Pearl S. Buck Quotes

The real question, therefore, is not whether students should be taught to think critically and self-reflectively, but instead what they should be thinking critically about.

My students may have dexterity with the equations they're required to know, but they lack the capacity to apply their knowledge to real-life problems. This critical shortcoming appears in high school and possibly in elementary grades - long before college.

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

The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking.

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

It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete.

Time and again, we have found the 'idle' truths arrived at through the process of inquiry to be of the greatest moment for practical human affairs.

The primary difference that I have found between the system of education in India and other countries, particularly the U.S., is that they focus on problem solving and relating theories to reality around them. These two things are lacking in the education system in India.

Common Core reminds us what testing can do right. Modeled on standards of the world's education superpowers, questions demand critical thinking and creativity. Students are asked to write at length, show their work, and explain their reasoning.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.

There is a dearth of thinking skills - people are taught what to think, not how.

Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

Here, class attendance is expected and students are required to take notes, which they are tested on. What is missing, it seems to me, is the use of knowledge, the practical training.

We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.

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.

We don't teach kids how to think anymore. We're getting rid of the classics - high school is all about self-esteem.

In the end we retain from our studies only that which we practically apply.

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 value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think

He that has sense knows that learning is not knowledge, but rather the art of using it.

The difficulty in our education up till now lies, for the most part, in the fact that knowledge did not refine itself into will, to application of itself, to pure practice. The realists felt the need and supplied it, though in a most miserable way, by cultivating idea-less and fettered "practical men." Most college students are living examples of this sad turn of events. Trained in the most excellent manner, they go on training; drilled they continue drilling.

[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 should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.

The [engineer] should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning, for it is by his judgement that all work done by the other arts is put to test. This knowledge is the child of practice and theory.

Our great mistake in education is ... the worship of book-learning-the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. ... We ought to follow exactly the opposite course with children-to give them a wholesome variety of mental food, and endeavour to cultivate their tastes, rather than to fill their minds with dry facts.