Rick Baker Quotes

They are deceptively simple. I admit that. But for me, all my life I try to simplify things. As a child in school, things were very hard for me to understand often, and I developed a knack, I think. I developed a process to simplify things so I would understand them.

You've never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say.

To know the rules of the game, you have to be educated.

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.

I think there's so much negative influence on children in school settings. It becomes learning by rote to pass a test. It's not contextualized.

There's always a learning curve, where you've got to learn what your subject is all about.

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

Don't worry too much if you don't pass exams, so long as you feel you have understood the subject. It's amazing what you can get by the ability to reason things out by conventional methods, getting down to the basics of what is happening.

I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

A diploma only proves that you know how to look up answers.

There is a dearth of thinking skills - people are taught what to think, not how.

In most schools, we measure children on what they know. By and large, they have to memorize the content of whatever test is coming up. Because measuring the results of rote learning is easy, rote prevails. What kids know is just not important in comparison with whether they can think.

I have never read for entertainment, but rather for understanding and to satisfy my eager curiosity.

I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.

It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!

Science is a way of getting knowledge. It's a method. It's a method that really relies on making mistakes. We propose ideas, they are usually wrong, and we test them against the data. Scientists do this in a formal way. It's a way that everyone can go through life; that's how we should be teaching science from a very young age.

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

When you are studying from a book, lots of people go straight to the end to look for the answers. But that's not my style. For me, the most enjoyable part is the puzzle, the process of solving, not the solution itself.

Education is far less about a set of facts than a way of thinking, than learning how to critically think. And therefore, what I always think should be the basis of education is not answers but questions.

I'm very inquisitive, and I always have questions and need to touch things to see how it works or why it works.

The search for information gives me more confidence, because confidence arises from understanding.

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

Teachers may think they are stuffing minds, but all they are ever affecting is the memory. Nothing can ever be forced into anyone's mind except by brainwashing, which is the very opposite of genuine teaching.

Thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned.

Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.