Donald Knuth Quotes

By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.

It's always extremely interesting to speak at colleges. My books are taught in many colleges in America and are part of the educational system, so it's really important to me. I don't believe in so many things in life, but something I believe in is education.

Teaching can be learning, especially if student curiosity with the question 'What's going on here?' can be elicited.

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know, and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

What passes for a curriculum in today's schools is little else than a strategy of distraction... It is largely defined to keep students from knowing themselves and their environment in any realistic sense; which is to say, it does not allow inquiry into most of the critical problems that comprise the content of the world outside the school.

The human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.

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.

When you have solved the problem of controlling the attention of the child, you have solved the entire problem of its education.

When you are studying from a book, lots of people go straight to the end to look for the answers. But that's not my style. For me, the most enjoyable part is the puzzle, the process of solving, not the solution itself.

I re-read the books I assign to my students. Each time I do, I learn something new.

Every game gives you a new challenge, and new problems to solve.

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

Education is taken for granted. Teaching shops are different from building character.

I think the only value of being in school is that everything you do should be a problem that needs to be solved. Everything should be a challenge.

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

The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered.

The trouble with school is they give you the answer, then they give you the exam. That's not life.

[on education] It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know, and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it.

Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined only in part by puzzle-solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles reflecting what your senses report that you round out the definitions.

The purpose of adult education is to help them to learn, not to teach them all you know and thus stop them from learning.

Merely to stuff the child with a lot of information, making him pass examinations, is the most unintelligent form of education.

Learning is not to be tacked to the mind, but we must fuse and blend them together, not merely giving the mind a slight tincture, but a thorough and perfect dye. And if we perceive no evident change and improvement, it would be better to leave it alone; learning is a dangerous weapon, and apt to wound its master if it be wielded by a feeble hand, and by one not well acquainted with its use.