Charles William Eliot Quotes

The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences.

Adults sometimes think children don't think. That's what propels them to order children around. But children do integrate thoughts and make sense of them. When I was a child, I thought about everything in the universe.

I really feel strongly that we don't need to dumb things down for children.

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

What blockheads are those wise persons, who think it necessary that a child should comprehend everything it reads.

What will a child learn sooner than a song?

How hard would it be to ask children what they see in their heads? How big should the house be in comparison to the family standing in front of it? What is it about the anatomy of the people that doesn't look right? Then let them try it again. Teach them to learn how to see and ask questions.

Reading aloud and talking about what we're reading sharpens children's brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly.

Play reaches the habits most needed for intellectual growth.

The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think.

My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.

You've never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say.

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

All children know when something is wrong and they can't understand something - they never need someone to tell them they're stupid. They need help in solving the problem.

Education is far less about a set of facts than a way of thinking, than learning how to critically think. And therefore, what I always think should be the basis of education is not answers but questions.

Children love this idea that their brain is like a muscle that gets stronger as they use it.

Skills acquisition is really at the heart of what it means to learn.

Kids aren't dumb - they might not get something, but they're going to figure it out.

What is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn?

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

My father taught in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child

Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation or the continuance of his species.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

We've taught you that the earth is round, That red and white make pink, And something else that matters more - We've taught you how to think.