Geoff Mulgan Quotes

All of our schools need to bring 'learn from doing' into the mainstream education, not just afternoon.

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.

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.

When we teach in pluralistic ways, there are two wonderful dividends. First of all, we reach more students, because some learn best through stories, some through works of art, some through role play etc. Second of all, we show what it is like really to understand something.

A good teacher offers practice, a bad one offers theories.

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

I went to an inner-city school in Buffalo. We had no money. But our teachers believed in hands-on active learning - there was a mandatory science fair, which was critical.

Kids need time for problem solving, critical thinking, applying knowledge through project-based instruction, working in teams, falling down and getting right back up to figure out what they didn't understand and why.

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.

You can go to school and learn and that works for some people. But I think the best kind of learning is practical and learning on the job.

Learning is not watching a video, learning is taking action and seeing what happens.

That education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about.

Like all great teachers he knew that a picture is worth a thousand words and that people learn most quickly by doing something or seeing something done.

I think we all learn by doing rather than thinking about doing.

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

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.

There is only one way to learn... It's through action.

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.

When you learn through coding, [you're] coding to learn. You're learning it in a meaningful context, and that's the best way of learning things.

We should spend less time at universities filling our students' minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity … by actually talking with them.

I now know that I learn by solving problems as they arise. Rarely do we learn significant lessons, or significantly improve, any other way.

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better , if less "showily." Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself... Teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.

It's priceless what you learn when you actually do. It's like going to film school times eleven. The best education is effectively to be functioning in the occupation that you want to take on.

Where are these rational practices to be taught and acquired? Not within the four walls of a bare building, in which formality predominates... But in the nursery, play-ground, fields, gardens, workshops, manufactures, museums and class-rooms. ...The facts collected from all these sources will be concentrated, explained, discussed, made obvious to all, and shown in their direct application to practice in all the business of life.

People are visual and hands on learners.