Edgar Z. Friedenberg Quotes

There are two schools. The school where you go and open a book, and then there's the school of life. When you learn hands-on, often you don't understand why you do what you do and what's the word for that action.

All genuine education comes about through experience.

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

There is a certain amount you can learn from reading, but you also need to see and experience things.

As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.

Education is cheap; experience is expensive.

Knowing how to swim doesn't come from someone else showing you or someone else telling you or watching movies of other people swimming. It comes from having been in the water, knowing how to move yourself through the water and not sink. And it's true of virtually everything in our lives: knowing comes from direct experience.

If there is knowledge, it lies in the fusion of the book and the street.

The things that have been most valuable to me I did not learn in school. Traditional education is based on facts and figures and passing tests - not on a comprehension of the material and its application to your life.

I've opened up my school in California in a beautiful facility on Ventura Boulevard. I'm always in heaven when I'm doing my classes.

Feed the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally communicated information.

I'm a high school teacher. I'm someone who stumbles my way through, leads with my chin in some cases, leads with my heart in all cases.

The only way of learning the method of science is the long and bitter way of personal experience.

There is only one way to learn. It's through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey.

Reading is learning, but applying is also learning and the more important kind of learning at that. Our chief method is to learn warfare through warfare. A person who has had no opportunity to go to school can also learn warfare — he can learn through fighting in a war.

Remember that experience creates internalization. Doing things repeatedly leads to internalization, which produces a quality of understanding that is generally vastly superior to intellectualized learning.

Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience.

It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.

The thing about witchcraft," said Mistress Weatherwax, "is that it's not like school at all. First you get the test, and then afterward you spend years findin' out how you passed it. It's a bit like life in that respect

School's a weird thing. I'm not sure it works.

The point is that whatever one is trying to learn, it is necessary to have firsthand experience, rather than learning from books or from teachers or by merely conforming to an already established pattern.

No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.

True teaching cannot be learned from text-books any more than a surgeon can acquire his skill by reading about surgery.

You're not going to learn how to do it until you do it.