Rote Learning Quotes

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!

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.

Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?

I knew all the right Bible answers and the Sunday school answers.

It is one thing to remember, another to know. To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to the memory. But to know is to make each thing one's own, not depend on the text and always to look back to the teacher. "Zeno said this, Cleanthes said this." Let there be space between you and the book.

The relation of repetitions for learning and for repeating English stanzas needs no amplification. These were learned by heart on the first day with less than half of the repetitions necessary for the shortest of the syllable series.

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.

The British system had requirements, including Latin. I'm not positive you ever had to know Greek, but there are certainly kinds of curricula where you had to know Greek too. I think in Britain there was the most mindless, repetitive sort of learning.

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

I've got an awful memory, and I can't read or write, but you can read me a script once or twice, and I've got it.

We are taught words, not ideas.

People who've been through our educational system, they think they're thinking, when they're just repeating like parrots.

I think there's too much emphasis placed on learning things by rote that you don't really care about. So what happens to students in school is that they eventually lose interest in learning, because they've been forced to learn the required courses, rather than pursing their passion.

Now, we don't teach children in schools to be creative. We don't teach them to experiment. We want them to fill in the right answer, tick the right answer in the box.

Actually, most mathematics courses do not teach reasoning of any kind. Students are so baffled by the material that they are obliged to memorize in order to pass examinations.

As a child, I learned hundreds of poems by heart, which I can recite to this day.

We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think.

You know, I'm not terribly fast at my times tables, because that's not what I think mathematics is about.

Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not.

Almost everyone today is brain-damaged by our education which is designed to produce docile automatons.

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

Education today is a process of filling the mind with the contents of books, emptying the contents in the examination hall and returning empty-headed.

I'm not somebody that opens a playbook and just turns and reads and reads. That doesn't do it for me.

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.