Aaron Swartz Quotes

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information.

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves.

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

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

I am writing to make sure that kids don't lose very important traits like curiosity that can drive social change because oftentimes I think parents emphasise more on doing well in school, which is important, but perhaps that sometimes comes at the cost of a child's natural curiosity.

It's the way I study - to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

If children know there is someone standing over them who knows all the answers, they are less inclined to find the answers for themselves.

Kids get bored easily. They have got to get out and get their hands dirty: make things, dismantle things, fix things.

Doing real world projects is, I think, the best way to learn and also to engage the world and find out what the world is all about.

Science class is traditionally taught as science history class - you learn all these facts that someone else discovered, which you need to know, but that's not really an inspiring way to learn science.

Participation, I think, or one of the best methods of educating.

Our education system is increasingly embracing a black-and-white way of thinking, in which 'learning' and 'play' are diametrically opposed. 'Learning' is the serious stuff that happens inside a classroom and can be measured via multiple choice questions and a No. 2 pencil. 'Play' is frivolous, fun, and worst of all, optional.

Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.

Education must be aimed at creating a wider imagination in the child, not at suppressing. The child's mind must be set free.

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

… to develop a plan to promote better science education

The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.

The drills we do, where you're telling kids to memorize things, don't actually work. What works is engaging them and letting them do things and discover things.

Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.

Education is not just you learn how a mosquito flies in the rain, but you learn how to be creative and why it's exciting to learn things and create things and make up new things.

There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt.

Learning is an active process. We learn by doing.. Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.

I'm more of a creative learner, ... I do very well in projects, but I was not good at memorizing all of that material in the introductory courses.

[America] doesn't have an emphasis anymore on original discovery. Everything is based on teaching and learning for tests. Memorizing what you are taught, not on actually making discoveries. People are being treated as herded cattle instead of as human beings capable of making original, creative discoveries.

Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.