Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

[America] doesn't have an emphasis anymore on original discovery. Everything is based on teaching and learning for tests. Memorizing what you are taught, not on actually making discoveries. People are being treated as herded cattle instead of as human beings capable of making original, creative discoveries.

The problem I have with schools is, people are taught, 'This is how you do this.' They're not taught about why you do this.

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

Education today is a process of filling the mind with the contents of books, emptying the contents in the examination hall and returning empty-headed.

When you are forced to think, you expand your mental capacity. When you expand your mental capacity, your wealth increases.

The mind is left bereft when it is nothing more than a tool of regurgitation.

Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions and phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them.

We are taught words, not ideas.

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.

Academic education is the act of memorizing things read in books, and things told by college professors who got their education mostly by memorizing things read in books.

Reading and writing, arithmetic and grammar do not constitute education, any more than a knife, fork and spoon constitute a dinner.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

Pat answers to complex problems are the hallmark of intellectual mediocrity

I like friends who have independent minds because they tend to make you see problems from all angles.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

A research problem is not solved by apparatus; it is solved in a man's head.

I think being a producer makes you a problem solver, so you kind of go, "Well there's a problem. What do we do? How do we solve it?"

Teaching for creativity aims to encourage self-confidence, independence of mind, and the capacity to think for oneself.

Always it is thus with my new students, and especially with the human ones; the mind is the last muscle they train or use, and the one that they regard the least. Ask them about swordplay and they can list every blow from a duel a month old, but ask them to solve a problem or make a coherent statement and... well, I would be lucky to get more than a blank stare in return.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.

Invert, always invert.

When you give success to stupid people, it makes them more stupid sometimes and not more intelligent.

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.

It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.

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.