Derrick Jensen Quotes

There is something out of gear about graded schools and all that. Memory is developed at the expense of what in general we are pleased to call thought and character.

Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience-that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible-that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.

The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.

. . . besides love, independence of thought is the greatest gift an adult can give a child.

The kids are not brought up to have minds of their own as individuals.

And I love doing my own projects; that's what I've always wanted to do.

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

I encourage all of you to seek out teachers and mentors that challenge you to think for yourself and guide you to find your own voice.

What would happen if we finally succeeded in following the directions of nature and recognized that the great secret of education lies hidden in the maxim, 'Do not educate'?

A Western upbringing tends to stress questioning authority, which is always asking why, why, why.

We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others

Each of you, as an individual, must pick your own goals. Listen to others, but do not become a blind follower.

Education must not simply teach work - it must teach Life.

The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.

The most desirable mode of education, is that which is careful that all the acquisitions of the pupil shall be preceded and accompanied by desire . . . The boy, like the man, studies because he desires it. He proceeds upon a plan of is own invention, or by which, by adopting, he has made his own. Everything bespeaks independence and inequality.

I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself.

Education (the institution) has now adopted values, attitudes, and practices that make any rigorous understanding of the human self and life impossible.

Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence.

When someone is taught the joy of learning, it becomes a life-long process that never stops, a process that creates a logical individual. That is the challenge and joy of teaching.

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

Even when I read a book, if the book leaves me the possibility of finding certain solutions or working on my own toward a solution, I prefer that much more than if the book fills me with the answers, gives them to me directly.

Don't read a book and be a follower; read a book and be a student.

I do not enlighten those who are not eager to learn, nor arouse those who are not anxious to give an explanation themselves. If I have presented one corner of the square and they cannot come back to me with the other three, I should not go over the points again.

Not that I wish to give you any ammunition, but the sad fact of it is-most men are sheep. Where one goes, the rest will follow. And didn't you say you wished to be married?' 'Not to someone who follows you as the lead sheep.