Learning Efficiency Quotes

The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (tutor to Nero) complained that his peers were wasting time and money accumulating too many books, admonishing that "the abundance of books is a distraction." Instead, Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books, to be read thoroughly and repeatedly.

The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

When I was seven, I had to stay home for several weeks because of some ailment, whereupon my father elected to teach me so that I should not fall behind. In fact, he taught me in three months as much as the school taught in two years, so, on returning to school, I was shifted from grade 4 to grade 6.

Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.

Learn your lessons quickly and move on.

It's important to learn from your mistakes, but it is BETTER to learn from other people's mistakes, and it is BEST to learn from other people's successes. It accelerates your own success.

The more one knows, the more one simplifies.

Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.

Life is too short to learn everything by personal experience.

It has often been said there’s so much to be read, you never can cram all those words in your head.

The road by precepts is tedious, by example, short and efficacious.

Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. I can spend half a dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about.

What I did by virtue of skipping a lot of classes was get two undergraduate degrees and a master's in four years. It wasn't slacking. There were much more productive ways of learning everything than sitting in lectures.

THE TEACHER AS A NECESSARY EVIL. Let us have as few people as possible between the productive minds and the hungry and recipient minds! The middlemen almost unconsciously adulterate the food which they supply. It is because of teachers that so little is learned, and that so badly.

I hate learning through experience. Just once I'd like to learn something because someone was nice enough to tell me in advance.

All of the details that most of us memorize in medical school - you don't have to learn those things. They're going to be in your computer.

The more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forget it.

I wonder what especial sanctity attaches itself to fifteen minutes. It is always the maximum and the minimum of time which will enable us to acquire languages, etiquette, personality, oratory ... One gathers that twelve minutes a day would be hopelessly inadequate, and twenty minutes a wasteful and ridiculous excess.

You must acquire the best knowledge first, and without delay; it is the height of madness to learn what you will later have to unlearn.

Life must be kept up at a great rate in order to absorb any considerable amount of learning.

The memory should be specially taxed in youth, since it is then that it is strongest and most tenacious. But in choosing the things that should be committed to memory the utmost are and forethought must be exercised; as lessons well learnt in youth are never forgotten.

There is a great need for a new approach, new methods and new tools in teaching, man's oldest and most reactionary craft. There is great need for a rapid increase in the productivity of learning. There is, above all, great need for methods that will make the teacher effective and multiply his or her efforts and competence. Teaching is, in fact, the only traditional craft in which we have not yet fashioned the tools that make an ordinary person capable of superior performance. In this respect, teaching is far behind medicine, where the tools first became available a century or more ago.

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!" "Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

I love information. I want to stay current. I don't want to be under-informed. But I'm busy. Sometimes, I need an instant overview of a situation that I can grasp in a second.

Technology has enormous potential to address educational needs more efficiently, help teachers improve their performance, and enrich and individualize student learning.