Donald Norman Quotes

The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

I prefer home-schooling because you can work at your own pace and go towards more what you're interested in, whether it be history or geography or math.

When we home schooled my oldest, Jasper, in eighth grade, I saw how empowering it is for a child to learn in their own way. That rebooted my thinking about education.

When I was 16, I was taught by a wonderful teacher who let me ignore the Greek syllabus and just read Homer.

I don't think we will put higher-ed out of business. I think we'll evolve it. More access, higher quality, lower costs, more global reach.

I think educational systems have to be more nimble, have to be more adapted to today's realities where students can go in different directions and professionalize even faster. Constant retraining and reskilling and upskilling, whatever you want to call it, of the workforce.

If high-quality content can be effectively delivered via technology, teachers can devote more time to creating innovative experiences, leading Socratic dialogs, or coaching students one-on-one in more targeted and focused interventions.

You don't actually need to know anything, you can find out at the point when you need to know it. It's the teachers job to point young minds towards the right kind of question, a teacher doesn't need to give any answers because answers are everywhere.

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.

Learning should take place when it is needed, when the learner is interested, not according to some arbitrary, fixed schedule

Teachers who do not take their own education seriously, who do not study, who make little effort to keep abreast of events have no moral authority to coordinate the activities of the classroom.

Public libraries are our great teachers and storytellers, and are a vital adjunct to our schools. In this day of standardized and homogenized education, a library offers individual and personalized learning opportunities second to none.

There should be no element of slavery in learning. Enforced exercise does no harm to the body, but enforced learning will not stay in the mind. So avoid compulsion, and let your children's lessons take the form of play.

The business of both parent and teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic material

I am in an extended self-directed course of study. That is, I am in control of my own life.

Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. My three [great teachers] did not tell - they catalyzed a burning desire to know. Under their influence, the horizons sprung wide and fear went away and the unknown became knowable. But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and very precious.

We need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. It’s not about making learning happen; it’s about letting it happen.

When teachers stop learning, so do students.

Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except... the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.

A teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame. The teacher who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge but merely repeats his lesson to his students, can only load their minds, he cannot quicken them.

We all learn best in our own ways. Some people do better studying one subject at a time, while some do better studying three things at once. Some people do best studying in structured, linear way, while others do best jumping around, surrounding a subject rather than traversing it. Some people prefer to learn by manipulating models, and others by reading.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.

Standardised tests cannot capture all, but on the other hand, students who are not capable of doing well on standardised tests are not well-equipped to thrive in today's world and so it's important for teachers to ensure that students gain the foundation necessary to meet the baseline educational standards these tests represent.

I wish to become a teacher of the Truth.