Margaret Mead Quotes

The ability to learn is older as it is also more widespread than is the ability to teach.

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Having culture means we are the only animal that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors, rather than from the genes they pass to us.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

It would be better, in a way, if any adults present were completely uneducated. There is nothing children like more than passing on information they have just discovered to people who may not already have it - an elderly grandmother, for instance.

Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.

There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.

Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

While we teach, we learn.

Writing preserves only the thought of literate peoples.

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it .... For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?

Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.

Through writing, Homo sapiens then became the first species to preserve learning, enabling knowledge to grow, ultimately at an exponential pace. Collective learning over time then became the source of technological improvement, a process that could move much faster than evolution.

Because human nature evolved in an era before collective learning accelerated, we are all fitted to living in a world that does not change much after our formative years.

I think it is so important to pass down knowledge and information to younger generations.

At its deepest level, I think teaching is about bringing people into communion with each other, with yourself as the teacher, and with the subject you are teaching.

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.

Humans are more dependent on learning for survival than other species,We have no instincts that automatically find us food and shelter !

I have a responsibility to pass on to the next generation what I learned from my teachers, ... It keeps me young and reminds me where I came from. Teaching young artists is like giving water to a flower.

Giving information that will help everybody live better. That's a teacher's dream - to accumulate information and disperse it in a form that allows people to choose the way they're going to use it. That's what I think I do best.

They call it coaching but it is teaching. You do not just tell them...you show them the reasons.

Teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation