When I was 3 my parents put me in gymnastics because I was a bundle of energy and they just didn't know what to do with me! They put me in a Tots class and I just fell in love with it.
The idea of going to school and getting a job is the most destructive one in your brain.
Education makes a straight ditch of a free meandering brook.
To know the rules of the game, you have to be educated.
Education has rules and parameters. Women outperform men when the parameters are clear.
Every good teacher and every good parent has somehow learned to negotiate the paradox of freedom and discipline. We want our children and our students to become people who think and live freely, yet at the same time we know that helping them become free requires us to restrict their freedom in certain situations.
Our education system teaches the young what to think, not how to think. And if you ever wonder why so many things don't work properly any more, or why you can't get any sense out of so many organisations, this is one of the main reasons.
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.
I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked.
Education must lead us from the irresponsible opinion to true responsible judgment. It must lead us from chance and arbitrariness to rational clarity and intellectual order. Therefore, let us guide our students over the road of discipline from materials, through function, to creative work.
We've educated children to think spontaneity is inappropriate.
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.
What you notice in French nurseries is just how calm they are. All of their classes are structured and led by teachers. It's a requirement.
Today's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules.
I had been playing since I was 2 years old, never remembering a life without music, always playing everything naturally and mostly by ear, and all the grownups wanted were more scales and drudgery out of me.
We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.
My mum was methodical in making sure we did our homework perfectly. She would do outlines to help us. When we were younger, she used flash cards.
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical.
You put a very talented kid in a structured environment, where they get to understand and believe how talented they are, and you'll see some great results.
I was fairly solitary. I didn't like structured learning. People didn't seem to be my cup of tea.
I prefer to work with mystery, but that doesn't work well in an academic environment. They want you to analyze what you're doing, which is toxic to the creative process for people like me.
I've written what and when I want to. It's been about expressing myself. But with the degree, I had to learn to do everything in a very specific, disciplined way. I am very disciplined, but this demanded a totally different kind of discipline. A real challenge.
All the children in the school should learn the steps of everything, before they learn the thing, then they know which step they're doing better, because your voice is in certain steps and has to do most of the things that have been composed in those steps.
You can't teach an ear, you can't teach talent, but you can teach people who have those things not to just fly by the seat of their pants.
