Louis Agassiz Quotes

Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just 'virtual reality.'

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

I went to an inner-city school in Buffalo. We had no money. But our teachers believed in hands-on active learning - there was a mandatory science fair, which was critical.

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

That education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about.

Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process.

Students were taught by doing.

True teaching cannot be learned from text-books any more than a surgeon can acquire his skill by reading about surgery.

It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book.

Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I've written and throwing it away.

For what one has to learn to do, we learn by doing.

In 1847 I gave an address at Newton, Mass., before a Teachers' Institute conducted by Horace Mann. My subject was grasshoppers. I passed around a large jar of these insects, and made every teacher take one and hold it while I was speaking. If any one dropped the insect, I stopped till he picked it up. This was at that time a great innovation, and excited much laughter and derision. There can be no true progress in the teaching of natural science until such methods become general.

To have a group of cloistered clinicians away completely from the broad current of professional life would be bad for teacher and worse for student. The primary work of a professor of medicine in a medical school is in the wards, teaching his pupils how to deal with patients and their diseases.

The point is that whatever one is trying to learn, it is necessary to have firsthand experience, rather than learning from books or from teachers or by merely conforming to an already established pattern.

There is only one way to learn... It's through action.

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.

You're not going to learn how to do it until you do it.

When you learn through coding, [you're] coding to learn. You're learning it in a meaningful context, and that's the best way of learning things.

A week of camp life is worth six months of theoretical teaching in the meeting room.

We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.

All genuine education comes about through experience.

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.

One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.

Learning has to come from doing, not intellectualizing.

I now know that I learn by solving problems as they arise. Rarely do we learn significant lessons, or significantly improve, any other way.