Daniel Greenberg Quotes

Play is the best natural resource in a creative economy. Kids need more of it. It is the work of childhood. We hope to intrinsically change the opinion that play is not just a luxury but an absolute necessity for kids' lives.

Children have such vibrant minds. They need to play. They need to be creative. They need to imagine. It's so important for their sense of self discovery. And it helps them learn problem-solving.

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

Play is the work of children. It's very serious stuff.

Imagination in the child is powerful. Reading and laughter and love are essential in our lives.

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

You see a child play, and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word. You can see how he solves his problems. You can also see what's wrong. Young children, especially, have enormous creativity, and whatever's in them rises to the surface in free play.

Art in the classroom not only spurs creativity, it also inspires learning.

I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.

Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that's nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.

A child's greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action.

Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.

It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.

Students read for tests and because their parents ask them to, but I think it's very important to tell children that you can read for fun, too, and to understand human spirit. It builds empathy.

If you watch young children play, you will notice that they create games, characters, situations, whole worlds in which they immerse themselves with intense concentration.

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

The best way to enhance a child's imagination is to make them read.

I think it is important for children to read different things to find out about their emotions and other people's emotions. It is an enormous source of education and culture.

We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist.

A huge part of what a kid learns when they're growing up is social and emotional development. As adults, we take it for granted that other people have emotions that are different from ours, and we can identify what they are, but those are skills that children have to learn.

The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.

Preschool children are virtuosos of imagination.

The kid who can play imaginatively doesn't tend to be violent. It's the same with adults.

If it's taught well, art really is important to kids early on. It helps children develop language and allows them to see themselves in a way that isn't right or wrong, because if they draw an animal with five legs instead of four, nobody's criticizing them for it.

The arts give kids the building blocks with which to then play.