William Glasser Quotes

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.

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.

Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things.

It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them to think.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

In our education system, we are taught to munch figures and remember them for lifetime. But does it help? We are not taught how to make decisions.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

Efforts to develop critical thinking falter in practice because too many professors still lecture to passive audiences instead of challenging students to apply what they have learned to new questions.

Memory and creativity are essential to education, but if you teach memory incorrectly, it is a total waste of time, and it will inhibit learning.

I think school is a place where thinking should be taught.

I do think observing is important in learning.

Many of you have been reared on the cliche that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong.

"Thinking about thinking" has to be a principle ingredient of any empowering practice of education.

The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking.

Today much of what we call education is merely knowledge gathering and remembering. Problem solving and thinking, never strong parts of our educational system, have been downgraded in all but a few scientific subjects.

The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.

In fourth grade, I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like medicine or engineering, it had a definite, valuable purpose: to foster 'comprehension.'

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.

We cannot create observers by saying 'observe', but by giving them the power and the means for this observation and these means are procured through education of the senses.

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.

Common Core, the initiative that claims to more accurately measure K-12 student knowledge in English and math, also encourages children to step up their 'critical thinking.'

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers

We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test.