Kenneth Arrow Quotes

The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.

Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.

A teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame. The teacher who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge but merely repeats his lesson to his students, can only load their minds, he cannot quicken them.

I was a bad student. My teachers gave up trying to teach me how to read music.

My colleagues and I were always having the same conversation in the teachers lunchroom about books we wanted our students to read, a field trip we knew would really bring a subject matter to life... And most of us would go into our own pockets to buy just paper and pencils.

I think when a teacher says that you're ready for something, it means you're ready to learn it. It doesn't always mean that you are completely capable of doing everything that's inside the piece.

It wasn't that long ago that I was coming up, but it feels almost ancient that you had to go to the library and you had 'World Book Encyclopedias.'

After I finished my degree in India in 1980, I came to the U.S. to get a master's, and I was teaching quantum physics to freshmen. As I got my bearings as to what goes on in labs, I understood that to teach, you have to learn.

THE TEACHER AS A NECESSARY EVIL. Let us have as few people as possible between the productive minds and the hungry and recipient minds! The middlemen almost unconsciously adulterate the food which they supply. It is because of teachers that so little is learned, and that so badly.

The carefully fostered theory that schoolwork can be made easy and enjoyable breaks down as soon as anything, however trivial, has to be learned.

The number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn.

All wish to be learned, but no one is willing to pay the price.

Teachers may think they are stuffing minds, but all they are ever affecting is the memory. Nothing can ever be forced into anyone's mind except by brainwashing, which is the very opposite of genuine teaching.

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.

... there is no valid teaching from which there does not emerge something learned and through which the learner does not become capable of recreating and remaking what has been taught.

We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school or in great laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends upon our own powers of insight.

Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.

Learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding.

Instead of sending guns, send books. Instead of sending weapons, send teachers.

Oh, sure. What's this supposed to teach me?" "Is it what the teacher teaches? Or what the students learns?" "What's the difference?" "That is, itself, a question worth considering, yes?" -Jacen & Vergere

No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.

One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought as to say he has taught when no one has learned.

Dollar for dollar there is no better investment in the world than a book

God help the teacher, if a man of sensibility and genius, when a booby father presents him with his booby son, and insists on lighting up the rays of science in a fellow's head whose skull is impervious and inaccessible by any other way than a positive fracture with a cudgel.

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.