Alison Gopnik Quotes

We've become so accustomed to teaching to the tests that we've forgotten about a child's joy of discovery.

Children's ability to learn is infinite when they are engaged.

From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It's just they are equally interested in exploring both.

In our education system, we are taught to munch figures and remember them for lifetime. But does it help? We are not taught how to make decisions.

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.

Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.

Students read for tests and because their parents ask them to, but I think it's very important to tell children that you can read for fun, too, and to understand human spirit. It builds empathy.

Children have such vibrant minds. They need to play. They need to be creative. They need to imagine. It's so important for their sense of self discovery. And it helps them learn problem-solving.

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves.

One seeks to equip the child with deeper, more gripping, and subtler ways of knowing the world and himself.

I believe everything learned in college is an answer to a question that someone has posed. Questions get posed differently and the answers that come back transport us to places we never knew existed.

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

I still believe that education is about provoking some kind of original, creative thought.

It's very important to put children in an environment where they can take things apart; where they can break things and then learn to fix them; where they can trust their hands and know their capacity to manipulate objects.

Music enhances the education of our children by helping them to make connections and broadening the depth with which they think and feel. If we are to hope for a society of culturally literate people, music must be a vital part of our children's education.

Children are just little scientists.

Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.

Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life?

Teaching how to think is better than lecturing how to do it.

The child’s progress does not depend only on his age, but also on being free to look around him.

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.

The focus of education should not be on suppressive information but on kindling the thirst for knowing.