Ludwig Wittgenstein 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

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

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.

Pedagogy must be oriented not to the yesterday, but to the tomorrow of the child's development. Only then can it call to life in the process of education those processes of development which now lie in the zone of proximal development

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 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.

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

[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?

For children mastery entails struggle. This means they must be permitted to struggle. If parents inappropriately step in to "help"-out of impatience or solicitude-they sabotage important learning. Among other things, the child is unlikely to discover the advantages of perseverance and self-discipline.

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.

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

Such knowledge is probably gained in several ways. One process undoubtedly operates through social comparison of success and failure experiences. Children repeatedly observe their own behavior and the attainments of others

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.

Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.

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

The child who defines a lie as being a "naughty word" knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word "lie".

If a child finds no stimuli for the activities which would contribute to his development, he is attracted simply to 'things' and desires to posses them.

It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults.