Albert Bandura Quotes

How children learn to use diverse sources of efficacy information in developing a stable and accurate sense of personal efficacy is a matter of considerable interest

A problem of future research is to clarify how young children learn what type of social comparative information is most useful for efficacy evaluation

The way I see it, we teach our children through modeling.

Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them

What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone

It’s not whether children learn from television, it’s what children learn from television... because everything that children see on television is teaching them something.

Those [things] that we encounter for the first time immediately have a spiritual effect upon us. A child, for whom every object is new, experiences the world in this way: it sees light, is attracted by it, wants to grasp it, burns its finger in the process, and thus learns fear and respect for the flame.

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

Do not offer the child the content of the mind, but the order for that content.

What blockheads are those wise persons, who think it necessary that a child should comprehend everything it reads.

The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin.

[Children] receive direct instruction from time to time about the appropriateness of various social comparisons

Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.

Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.

The development of a child is guaranteed in his curiosity to discover the cause behind each and every incident.

Learning to read and write makes little sense if you don't understand what you're reading and writing about. While we may have forgotten, most of our early learning came not from being explicitly taught but from experiencing. Kids aren't born knowing hard and soft, sweet and sour, red and green. When the child experiences those things, s/he transforms them into psychological understandings. When kids play with other kids, they learn about others and about themselves. Learning the basics of our physical and social reality is what early childhood is all about.

[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.

What will a child learn sooner than a song?

Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us.

Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.

As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.

I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.

The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child.

As soon as children find something that interests them they lose their instability and learn to concentrate.

The child learns so easily because he has a natural gift, but adults, because they are tyrants, ignore natural gifts and say that children must learn through the same process that they learned by. We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons