Lauren Oliver Quotes

A practical part of my teaching is to provide demonstrative, hands-on experiences.

Long is the road to learning by precepts, but short and successful by examples.

I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.

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

A school should not be a preparation for life. A school should be life.

The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.

We are taught for the schoolroom, not for life.

Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.

Teenagers learn best by doing things, they learn best in teams and they learn best by doing things for real - all the opposite of what mainstream schooling actually does.

Activity is the only road to knowledge.

Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.

Students were taught by doing.

It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.

Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books

There's nothing that can teach you more than experience.

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

What takes its place is very dry education. And the tools that actually can teach you - singing and playing, learning how to participate with other people, spiritual richness - are replaced with a big emphasis on how to memorize things. That's such an incomplete education. Survival of the fittest used to mean being bigger and stronger.

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's.

America's high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don't just mean that they're broken, flawed, or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools-even when they're working as designed-cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.

Now, tell me how you're going to teach the history of Jefferson, and cut out all those quotes and cut out all these facts, and cut out the key line of the Declaration of Independence: We are endowed by our Creator. I mean you have to have a conscious deliberate censorship of America, which is what the left and the courts and the classrooms has had for 40 years.

I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.

What is learned in high school, or for that matter anywhere at all, depends far less on what is taught than on what one actually experiences in the place.

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.

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.