Nicholas Negroponte Quotes

No one tells a child how to see, especially in the early years. They learn this through real-world experiences and examples.

If you just casually look at a baby, it doesn't look like there's very much going on there, but they know more and learn more than we would ever have thought. Every single minute is incredibly full of thought and novelty. It's easy as adults to take for granted everything it took to arrive at the state where we are.

If we learned to walk and talk the way we learn to read and write, everyone would limp and stutter.

Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, we evolved to find certain things stimulating, and as very intelligent, civilized beings, we're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning.

There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.

I kind of picked up the game at an early age. The way that other kids would learn what a fork or a spoon is.

Every game has to teach you how to walk, run, talk, use.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

But, if you observe children learning in their first few years of life, you can see that they can and do learn on their own - we leave them alone to crawl, walk, talk, and gain control over their bodies. It happens without much help from parents.

Man learns from the cradle to the grave.

The human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.

To acquire behavior, the student must engage in behavior

By the early seventeenth century, a new consensus began to arise: the idea that man was born incompetent for society and remained so unless he was provided with 'education.'

Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling from others.

In the first year of a child's life we teach them to walk and talk. And then for the rest of their lives we want them to sit down and be quiet.

It's hard to think of a 16-month child being anything other than a delight to be around.

Practice puts brains in your muscles.

You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

The process of learning requires not only hearing and applying but also forgetting and then remembering again.

I have for many years interested myself in the study of children from three years upwards. Many have urged me to continue my studies on the same lines with older children. But what I have felt to be most vital is the need for more careful and particularized study of the tiny child.

In the first three years of life, the foundations of physical and also of psychic health are laid. In these years, the child not only increases in size but passes through great transformations. This is the age in which language and movement develop. The child must be safeguarded in order that these activities may develop freely.

We've got to understand that the ages of zero to three are the most formative years of a person's life, the time they learn the concept of reward and punishment and develop a conscience, and that 50 percent of all learned human response is learned in the first year of life.

I believe a child's most important job is to explore the world around them through play.

The human brain long ago evolved a mechanism for rewarding us when we encountered new information: a little shot of dopamine in the brain each time we learned something new. Across evolutionary history, compulsively seeking information was adaptive behavior.