Inquiry-Based Quotes

We're not too out there to educate people about any specific thing necessarily so much as we are to encourage critical and scientific thinking.

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance.

Education is far less about a set of facts than a way of thinking, than learning how to critically think. And therefore, what I always think should be the basis of education is not answers but questions.

I love to write a book out of questions; in fact, I think it's the only way my writing can operate, if there's something I don't understand.

A big part of engaging kids in science is not getting the single, correct answer; it's being willing to work with students to discover the correct answer.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.

My goal is to invite readers to think along with me and draw their own conclusions.

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.

Every good educator knows that true teaching is to teach kids how to ask the right questions.

If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it.

To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.

The best teachers aren't those who answer our questions, but those who question our answers.

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry

Scientists generally, not just evolutionary biologists, don't take much for granted.

The alternative to doubt is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.

I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

Don't get in the way of children who find it natural and obvious to explore the world around them - even if it means they make a mess of your kitchen or living room. It's all about your perspective on these things. Let them play. When you do, the kids do not have to be reintroduced to ways of questioning nature, and the task of promoting science would be a trivial exercise.

Humans are natural-born scientists. When we're born, we want to know why the stars shine. We want to know why the sun rises.

Train yourselves. Don't wait to be fed knowledge out of a book. Get out and seek it. Make explorations. Do your own research work. Train your hands and your mind. Become curious. Invent your own problems and solve them. You can see things going on all about you. Inquire into them. Seek out answers to your own questions. There are many phenomena going on in nature the explanation of which cannot be found in books. Find out why these phenomena take place. Information a boy gets by himself is enormously more valuable than that which is taught to him in school.

The method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best.

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry.

I don't know. I imagine good teaching as a circle of earnest people sitting down to ask each other meaningful questions. I don't see it as a handing down of answers.

What is desired is that the teacher ceased being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions. His role should rather be that of a mentor stimulating initiative and research.