Oliver E. Williamson Quotes

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

One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.

It's not the teaching, it's the learning.

As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.

If you improve education by teaching for competence, eliminating schooling, and connecting with students, the test scores will improve.

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.

Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.

In an undergraduate business environment, the best learning experience is the interaction students have with each other. They need to learn from each other as much as from professors and lectures and other teaching tools.

If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

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.

My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” That difference — asking good questions — made me become a scientist.

I see no reason why there still are large lectures in universities throughout the world. When people gather, they should be interactive, problem-solving, and experimenting; not passively listening.

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

The questions are always more important than the answers.

Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it.

I love to learn; I really do. We'd study something in class, and I'd take it outside of class and become, like, obsessive and just research everything.

When you're too robotic and scripted, the students tune you out. So I always tried to use different learning modalities - kinesthetic, auditory, visual, whatever might bring learning to life.

Efforts to develop critical thinking falter in practice because too many professors still lecture to passive audiences instead of challenging students to apply what they have learned to new questions.

The reason I do workshops is so I can learn, and I am fortunate that I've probably gained more from the whole experience of teaching than any one participant has. It is all about asking.

This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth.

I always say I have a Socratic approach to most things that I do. I pummel people with questions, because I need to know what they're thinking, what they're trying to achieve, what they believe the final outcome is going to be.

I have always been much better at asking questions than knowing what the answers were.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

By looking at the questions the kids are asking, we learn the scope of what needs to be done.