Richard P. Feynman Quotes

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

I think there's so much negative influence on children in school settings. It becomes learning by rote to pass a test. It's not contextualized.

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

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.

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

My father's schooling during the 1930s was heavy with memorization; eight decades later, he is reaping the benefits.

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.

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.

Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not.

They don't like thinking in medical school. They memorize - that's all they want you to do. You must not think.

There's a lot of memorization that goes on in school. You memorize vocabulary words and all these sorts of things.

Schools still operate as if all knowledge is contained in books, and as if the salient points in books must be stored in each human brain - to be used when needed. The political and financial powers controlling schools decide what these salient points are.

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

Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.

People are adamant learning is not just looking at a Google page. But it is. Learning is looking at Google pages. What is wrong with that?

We need less memorization - I never memorized the periodic table of the elements - I've never used it, and I'm a physicist! I can look it up.

We are taught words, not ideas.

If I had found out anything, it was that they could print it faster than I could study it.

If kids are studying for a test, they're not going to learn anything. We all know that from our own experience.

In the pursuit of knowledge, follow it wherever it is to be found; like fern, it is the produce of all climates, and like coin, its circulation is not restricted to any particular class.

I have spent too much of my life opening doors for cats—I once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way. I could show you figures.

I am convinced that it is of primordial importance to learn more every year than the year before. After all, what is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn.