William Cowper Quotes

Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.

Probably the most important piece of advice that I've ever gotten is to develop your mind. I left school very young and I always regretted it.

The natural inclination of a child is to take pleasure in the use of the mind no less than of the body. The child's primary business is learning. It is also the primary entertainment. To retain that orientation into adulthood, so that consciousness is not a burden but a joy, is the mark of the successfully developed human being.

It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.

Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better

Learning is a kind of natural food for the mind.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and enlarge his talents.

Education forms the common mind.

All kids are born geniuses, but are crushed by society.

Whenever the child is given the notion that he needs to be entertained, learning comes almost to a halt.

The Goal of Education is to Help People Use Their Minds Better

No education deserves the name unless it develops thought, unless it pierces down to the mysterious spiritual principle of mind, and starts that into activity and growth.

Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?

Education is that human process of feeling your body mature, feeding your mind with ideas that it never had before, or information you never had. You simply cannot do that on a computer.

It is probable that there is no one thing that it is of eminent importance for a child to learn. The true object of juvenile education, is to provide, against the age of five and twenty, a mind well regulated, active, and prepared to learn. Whatever will inspire habits of industry and observation, will sufficiently answer this purpose.

In play, the child is always behaving beyond his age, above his usual everyday behaviour; in play he is, as it were, a head above himself. Play contains in a concentrated form, as in the focus of a magnifying glass, all developmental tendencies; it is as if the child tries to jump above his usual level.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise.

Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier.

All ignorance toboggans into know and trudges up to ignorance again.

Ignorance is death, knowledge is life. Life is of very little value, if it is a life in the dark, groping through ignorance and misery.

It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-that is to be educated.

Since the beginning of time, children have not liked to study. They would much rather play, and if you have their interests at heart, you will let them learn while they play.

There is no great concurrence between learning and wisdom.