Learning

320 quotes

Quotes

You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write.

Madeleine L'Engle

I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.

W.E.B. Du Bois

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

Nelson Mandela

I leave you a thirst for education. Knowledge is the prime need of the hour.

Mary McLeod Bethune

Our mission as teachers is to show the right way to those who come after us.

Antonín Dvořák

One must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

Vincent van Gogh

I had now the key to all language, and I was eager to learn to use it.

Helen Keller

The child who wrote a word for the first time was full of excited joy.

Maria Montessori

Education is one of the blessings of life and one of its necessities.

Malala Yousafzai

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Ernest Hemingway

Preparation, I have often said, is rightly two-thirds of any venture.

Amelia Earhart

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

Benjamin Franklin

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out.

Horace Mann

Example is the best lesson there is.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Education is the key to the future.

Sonia Sotomayor

When it is said that education is development, everything depends upon how development is conceived.John Dewey

But we learn only because after the act is performed we note results which we had not noted before.John Dewey

The teacher must be content to proceed very slowly, securing the ground under her feet as she goes.Charlotte M. Mason

It is useless for a dull and devitalized teacher to exhort her pupils to wake up and take an interest.William James

This pleasant earth of ours is not to be overlooked in the out-of-door education of the children.Charlotte M. Mason

What impulses are moving toward, not what they have been, is the important thing for parent and teacher.John Dewey

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be.William James

Spiritual teaching, like the wafted odour of flowers, should depend on which way the wind blows.Charlotte M. Mason

The first office of the social organ we call the school is to provide a simplified environment.John Dewey

The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation.William James

One ounce of good nervous tone in an examination is worth many pounds of anxious study for it in advance.William James

Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself.John Dewey

Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.William James

Constructiveness is another great instinctive tendency with which the schoolroom has to contract an alliance.William James

For the evil is, that children get their knowledge of natural history, like all their knowledge, at second hand.Charlotte M. Mason

By all means let child-study go on,—it is refreshing all our sense of the child's life.William James

The teacher, therefore, need never concern himself about inventing occasions where effort must be called into play.William James

Still more important is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning.John Dewey

A knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise.John Dewey

Of all his early studies, perhaps none is more important to the child as a means of education than that of arithmetic.Charlotte M. Mason

The child may learn the multiplication-table and do a subtraction sum without any insight into the rationale of either.Charlotte M. Mason

Learning to read is no more than picking up, how we can, a knowledge of certain arbitrary symbols for objects and ideas.Charlotte M. Mason

It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point.William James

A knowledge of meanings, that is, an ample and correct vocabulary, is only arrived at in one way—by the habit of reading.Charlotte M. Mason

In every branch of study there are happily turned, concise, and handy formulas which in an incomparable way sum up results.William James

Yet away back in childhood we find the beginnings of purely intellectual curiosity, and the intelligence of abstract terms.William James

Exercises treated as a game, which yet teach the powers of the letters, will be better to begin with than actual sentences.Charlotte M. Mason

The most common and the monstrous defect in the education of the day is that children fail to acquire the habit of reading.Charlotte M. Mason

To ignore the directive influence of this present environment upon the young is simply to abdicate the educational function.John Dewey

In the first place, we must teach that which we know, know by the life of the soul, not with any mere knowledge of the mind.Charlotte M. Mason

The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.William James

It is nonsense to suppose that every step in education can be interesting.William James

The educational error of our day is that we believe too much in mediators.Charlotte M. Mason

Geography is, to my mind, a subject of high educational value; though not because it affords the means of scientific training.Charlotte M. Mason

As societies become more complex in structure and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning increases.John Dewey

Hence education means the enterprise of supplying the conditions which insure growth, or adequacy of life, irrespective of age.John Dewey

In the schoolroom, imitation and emulation play absolutely vital parts.William James

But we do not ask him to ‘make a note of’ this new piece of knowledge; we let it grow into him gradually, after many experiences.Charlotte M. Mason

An activity which brings education or instruction with it makes one aware of some of the connections which had been imperceptible.John Dewey

Education, enlarging as it does our horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals, of bringing new ones into view.William James

I should say, therefore, that constant exercise in verbal memorizing must still be an indispensable feature in all sound education.William James

It is better that children should receive a few vital ideas that their souls may grow upon than a great deal of indefinite teaching.Charlotte M. Mason

In practice, education meets these conditions, and hence is general, in the degree in which it takes account of social relationships.John Dewey

The fundamental ideas of geography and the meaning of a map are subjects well fitted to form an attractive introduction to the study.Charlotte M. Mason

There is no one subject in which good teaching effects more, as there is none in which slovenly teaching has more mischievous results.Charlotte M. Mason

The child, who has been allowed to think and not compelled to cram, hails the new study with delight when the due time for it arrives.Charlotte M. Mason

The philosophy is eloquent about the duty of the teacher in instructing pupils; it is almost silent regarding his privilege of learning.John Dewey

The object-teaching is mainly to launch the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the facts concerned, upon the more abstract ideas.William James

In its higher, more intellectual form, the impulse toward completer knowledge takes the character of scientific or philosophic curiosity.William James

An effort should be made to treat the subject with the sort of sympathetic interest and freshness which attracts children to a new study.Charlotte M. Mason

And, pari passu with his knowledge of things, his vocabulary grows; for it is a law of the mind that what we know, we struggle to express.Charlotte M. Mason

Precisely so must the mind be sustained and developed by means of the food convenient for it, the mental pabulum of assimilated knowledge.Charlotte M. Mason

But the learning of the alphabet should be made a means of cultivating the child’s observation: he should be made to see what he looks at.Charlotte M. Mason

Let the parent who only knows one thing from above teach his child that one; more will come to him by the time the child is ready for more.Charlotte M. Mason

I just tried to do what I heard the horns in the band doing.

Ella Fitzgerald

Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.William James

Such a complete knowledge as this of the pupil, at once intuitive and analytic, is surely the knowledge at which every teacher ought to aim.William James

Knowledge is conveyed to them by lessons and talk, but the studious habit of using books as a means of interest and delight is not acquired.Charlotte M. Mason

The business of education is rather to liberate the young from reviving and retraversing the past than to lead them to a recapitulation of it.John Dewey

Education must take the being as he is; that a particular individual has just such and such an equipment of native activities is a basic fact.John Dewey

A possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other situations.John Dewey

Whenever a method of education is stigmatized as mechanical, we may be sure that external pressure is brought to bear to reach an external end.John Dewey

Our education means, in short, little more than a mass of possibilities of reaction, acquired at home, at school, or in the training of affairs.William James

In the first place, grammar, being a study of words and not of things, is by no means attractive to the child, nor should he be hurried into it.Charlotte M. Mason

It may be necessary to leave out a good deal, but every illustrative anecdote, every bit of description, is so much towards the child’s education.Charlotte M. Mason

The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment.John Dewey

One teacher's mind will fairly coruscate with points of connection between the new lesson and the circumstances of the children's other experience.William James

If education is growth, it must progressively realize present possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with later requirements.John Dewey

At the same time, let us recognise that learning to read is to many children hard work, and let us do what we can to make the task easy and inviting.Charlotte M. Mason

Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education.John Dewey

The great advantage of immaturity, educationally speaking, is that it enables us to emancipate the young from the need of dwelling in an outgrown past.John Dewey

The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.William James

So obvious, indeed, is the necessity of teaching and learning for the continued existence of a society that we may seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism.John Dewey

The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from one to another.John Dewey

When children go to school, they already have "minds"—they have knowledge and dispositions of judgment which may be appealed to through the use of language.John Dewey

Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group.John Dewey

The attention of his teachers should be fixed on two points—that he acquires the habit of reading, and that he does not fall into slipshod habits of reading.Charlotte M. Mason

But here, as elsewhere, it is a matter of more or less; and, in the last resort, the teacher's own tact is the only thing that can bring out the right effect.William James

The future is before him: he may get the next sum right, and the wise teacher will make it her business to see that he does, and that he starts with new hope.Charlotte M. Mason

We have all wondered at the good sense, reasonableness, fun and resourcefulness shown by a child in his own home as compared with the same child in school life.Charlotte M. Mason

This fact accounts for many of the apparently aimless questions of children; they are in quest, not of knowledge, but of words to express the knowledge they have.Charlotte M. Mason

But schools remain, of course, the typical instance of environments framed with express reference to influencing the mental and moral disposition of their members.John Dewey

The interest which the teacher, by his utmost skill, can lend to the subject, proves over and over again to be only an interest sufficient to let loose the effort.William James

A child has not begun his education until he has acquired the habit of reading to himself, with interest and pleasure, books fully on a level with his intelligence.Charlotte M. Mason

Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice?John Dewey

This principle of multiplying channels and varying associations and appeals is important, not only for teaching pupils to remember, but for teaching them to understand.William James

If we reflect upon the various ideals of education that are prevalent in the different countries, we see that what they all aim at is to organize capacities for conduct.William James

Man is an organism for reacting on impressions: his mind is there to help determine his reactions, and the purpose of his education is to make them numerous and perfect.William James

The school has the function also of coordinating within the disposition of each individual the diverse influences of the various social environments into which he enters.John Dewey

The child who gets no ideas from considering the map, say of Italy or of Russia, has no knowledge of geography, however many facts about places he may be able to produce.Charlotte M. Mason

Crowd on the athletic opportunities, the mental arithmetic, the verse-learning, the drawing, the botany, or what not, the moment you have reason to think the hour is ripe.William James

There is no occasion to hurry the child: let him learn one form at a time, and know it so well that he can pick out the d’s, say, big and little, in a page of large print.Charlotte M. Mason

They do not perceive that no effort is permissible towards the education of children without an intelligent conception, both of children, and of what is meant by education.Charlotte M. Mason

But the wise education takes the tide at the flood, and from the kindergarten upward devotes the first years of education to training in construction and to object-teaching.William James

What they want is graphic details concerning events and persons upon which imagination goes to work; and opinions tend to form themselves by slow degrees as knowledge grows.Charlotte M. Mason

And that, because, as none can appreciate more fully than the ‘Darwinian,’ the attitude of thought and feeling in which you place a child is the vital factor in his education.Charlotte M. Mason

therefore, if the business of teaching be to furnish the child with ideas, any teaching which does not leave him possessed of a new mental image has, by so far, missed its mark.Charlotte M. Mason

Of course, his teacher will take care that, in giving words, she gives idioms also, and that as he learns new words, they are put into sentences and kept in use from day to day.Charlotte M. Mason

Emulation becomes suicidal when it is used as the incentive to intellectual effort, because the desire for knowledge subsides in proportion as the desire to excel becomes active.Charlotte M. Mason

Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.John Dewey

If education is to secure the step-by-step progress of the individual and the race, it must mean something over and above the daily plodding at small tasks which goes by the name.Charlotte M. Mason

In learning an action, instead of having it given ready-made, one of necessity learns to vary its factors, to make varied combinations of them, according to change of circumstances.John Dewey

That the child should be taken daily, if possible, to scenes—moor or meadow, park, common, or shore—where he may find new things to examine, and so add to his store of real knowledge.Charlotte M. Mason

It is only when presented to the child for the first time in the form of stale knowledge and foregone conclusions that the facts taught in such lessons appear dry and repulsive to him.Charlotte M. Mason

But set him face to face with a thing, and he is twenty times as quick as you are in knowing all about it; knowledge of things flies to the mind of a child as steel filings to a magnet.Charlotte M. Mason

Narrating is an art, like poetry-making or painting, because it is there, in every child’s mind, waiting to be discovered, and is not the result of any process of disciplinary education.Charlotte M. Mason

In the second place, it is the business of the school environment to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing environment from influence upon mental habitudes.John Dewey

In learning 'by heart,' there are, however, efficient and inefficient methods; and, by making the pupil skilful in the best method, the teacher can both interest him and abridge the task.William James

Therefore his progress must be carefully graduated; but there is no subject in which the teacher has a more delightful consciousness of drawing out from day to day new power in the child.Charlotte M. Mason

And a knowledge of such psychology as this which I am recalling can no more make a good teacher than a knowledge of the laws of perspective can make a landscape painter of effective skill.William James

It is certain that most schoolroom work, till it has become habitual and automatic, is repulsive, and cannot be done without voluntarily jerking back the attention to it every now and then.William James

As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct associations and what is acquired in school.John Dewey

If the environment, in school and out, supplies conditions which utilize adequately the present capacities of the immature, the future which grows out of the present is surely taken care of.John Dewey

For when the schools depart from the educational conditions effective in the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish, a pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit.John Dewey

It is true that a grown-up adult keeps gaining well into middle age a great knowledge of details, and a great acquaintance with individual cases connected with his profession or business life.William James

Least of all need you, merely as teachers, deem it part of your duty to become contributors to psychological science or to make psychological observations in a methodical or responsible manner.William James

This process should go on side by side with the other—the learning of the powers of the letters; for the more variety you can throw into his reading lessons, the more will the child enjoy them.Charlotte M. Mason

It is in the infinitely little we must study the infinitely great; and the vast possibilities, and the right direction of education, are indicated in the open book of the little child’s thoughts.Charlotte M. Mason

But the danger she must be especially alive to, is the substitution of any other natural desire for that of knowledge, which is equally natural, and is adequate for all the purposes of education.Charlotte M. Mason

An inductive theory of education is, on the other hand, arrived at by means of long, slow, various, and laborious experiments which disclose, here a little, and there a little, of universal truth.Charlotte M. Mason

All education forms character, mental and moral, but formation consists in the selection and coordination of native activities so that they may utilize the subject matter of the social environment.John Dewey

Though system is highly useful as an instrument of education, a ‘system of education’ is mischievous, as producing only mechanical action instead of the vital growth and movement of a living being.Charlotte M. Mason

Definitely, what is it we propose in teaching a child to read? (a) that he shall know at sight, say, some thousand words; (b) that he shall be able to build up new words with the elements of these.Charlotte M. Mason

The busy mother says she has no leisure to be that somebody, and the child will run wild and get into bad habits; but we must not make a fetish of habit; education is a life as well as a discipline.Charlotte M. Mason

Having got a word fixed on the sure peg of the idea it conveys, the child will use his knowledge of the sounds of the letters to make up other words containing the same elements with great interest.Charlotte M. Mason

Schools are, indeed, one important method of the transmission which forms the dispositions of the immature; but it is only one means, and, compared with other agencies, a relatively superficial means.John Dewey

Our eyes and ears grow quickened to discern in the child before us processes similar to those we have read of as noted in the children,—processes of which we might otherwise have remained inobservant.William James

That the child’s observation should be directed to flower or boulder, bird or tree; that, in fact, he should be employed in gathering the common information which is the basis of scientific knowledge.Charlotte M. Mason

That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.William James

It is better that these teachings be rare and precious, than too frequent and slightly valued; better not at all, than that the child should be surfeited with the mere sight of spiritual food, rudely served.Charlotte M. Mason

Intentional education signifies, as we have already seen, a specially selected environment, the selection being made on the basis of materials and method specifically promoting growth in the desired direction.John Dewey

Therefore, the selection of their first lesson-books is a matter of grave importance, because it rests with these to give children the idea that knowledge is supremely attractive and that reading is delightful.Charlotte M. Mason

But a person has other uses in the world, and mother or teacher who regards him as a plant and herself as the gardener, will only be saved from grave mistakes by the force of human nature in herself and in her child.Charlotte M. Mason

There is, accordingly, a marked difference between the education which every one gets from living with others, as long as he really lives instead of just continuing to subsist, and the deliberate educating of the young.John Dewey

On the same principle, let him learn ‘weights and measures’ by measuring and weighing; let him have scales and weights, sand or rice, paper and twine, and weigh, and do up, in perfectly made parcels, ounces, pounds, etc.Charlotte M. Mason

Schools require for their full efficiency more opportunity for conjoint activities in which those instructed take part, so that they may acquire a social sense of their own powers and of the materials and appliances used.John Dewey

And so everywhere the teaching must agree with the psychology, but need not necessarily be the only kind of teaching that would so agree; for many diverse methods of teaching may equally well agree with psychological laws.William James

Once the habit of reading his lesson-books with delight is set up in a child, his education is—not completed, but—ensured; he will go on for himself in spite of the obstructions which school too commonly throws in his way.Charlotte M. Mason

Children should be encouraged to watch, patiently and quietly, until they learn something of the habits and history of bee, ant, wasp, spider, hairy caterpillar, dragon-fly, and whatever of larger growth comes in their way.Charlotte M. Mason

Carefully graduated teaching and daily mental effort on the child’s part at this early stage may be the means of developing real mathematical power, and will certainly promote the habits of concentration and effort of mind.Charlotte M. Mason

The teacher can formulate his function to himself therefore in terms of 'association' as well as in terms of 'native and acquired reaction.' It is mainly that of building up useful systems of association in the pupil's mind.William James

But much work in school consists in setting up rules by which pupils are to act of such a sort that even after pupils have acted, they are not led to see the connection between the result—say the answer—and the method pursued.John Dewey

What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of their grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity more productive of meaning.John Dewey

And, as the most general elements and workings are just those parts of psychology which the teacher finds most directly useful, it follows that the amount of this science which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.William James

This is what we wish to do for children in teaching them to draw—to cause the eye to rest, not unconsciously, but consciously, on some object of beauty which will leave in their minds an image of delight for all their lives to come.Charlotte M. Mason

There is, in fact, no greater school of effort than the steady struggle to attend to immediately repulsive or difficult objects of thought which have grown to interest us through their association as means, with some remote ideal end.William James

Translated into its educational equivalents, that means (i) that the educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end; and that (ii) the educational process is one of continual reorganizing, reconstructing, transforming.John Dewey

It is needless to repeat what has already been said on this subject; but, indeed, the future of the man or woman depends very largely on the store of real knowledge gathered, and the habits of intelligent observation acquired, by the child.Charlotte M. Mason

Consequently as soon as a community depends to any considerable extent upon what lies beyond its own territory and its own immediate generation, it must rely upon the set agency of schools to insure adequate transmission of all its resources.John Dewey

Particularly is it true that a society which not only changes but-which has the ideal of such change as will improve it, will have different standards and methods of education from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its own customs.John Dewey

The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and reciting them parrot-like in the schoolroom, rested on the truth that a thing merely read or heard, and never verbally reproduced, contracts the weakest possible adhesion in the mind.William James

In the learning of all matters, we have to start with some one deep aspect of the question, abstracting it as if it were the only aspect; and then we gradually correct ourselves by adding those neglected other features which complete the case.William James

Method, with the end of education in view, presses the most unlikely matters into service to bring about that end; but with no more tiresome mechanism than the sun employs when it makes the winds to blow and the waters to flow only by shining.Charlotte M. Mason

I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher education for men and women alike.William James

In his early years the child is all eyes; he observes, or, more truly, he perceives, calling sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing to his aid, that he may learn all that is discoverable by him about every new thing that comes under his notice.Charlotte M. Mason

Wherever an activity is broad in scope (that is, involves the coordinating of a large variety of sub-activities), and is constantly and unexpectedly obliged to change direction in its progressive development, general education is bound to result.John Dewey

One may learn by doing something which he does not understand; even in the most intelligent action, we do much which we do not mean, because the largest portion of the connections of the act we consciously intend are not perceived or anticipated.John Dewey

From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract programme for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.William James

The natural function of the mind, in the early years of life, is to gather the material of knowledge with a view to that very labour of generalisation which is proper to the adult mind; a labour which we should all carry on to some extent for ourselves.Charlotte M. Mason

Consequently, while a careful study of the native aptitudes and deficiencies of an individual is always a preliminary necessity, the subsequent and important step is to furnish an environment which will adequately function whatever activities are present.John Dewey

I say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.William James

I hope that my readers will train their children in the art of recitation; in the coming days, more even than in our own, will it behove every educated man and woman to be able to speak effectively in public; and, in learning to recite you learn to speak.Charlotte M. Mason

Children are more ready to appropriate lessons that are not directly levelled at themselves; while the teacher makes the teaching her own by the interest with which she reads, the pictures and other illustrations she shows, and her conversational remarks.Charlotte M. Mason

If words were always made on a given pattern in English, if the same letters always represented the same sounds, learning to read would be an easy matter; for the child would soon acquire the few elements of which all words would, in that case, be composed.Charlotte M. Mason

In other words, no matter how long ago we may have learned a poem, and no matter how complete our inability to reproduce it now may be, yet the first learning will still show its lingering effects in the abridgment of the time required for learning it again.William James

The child has truly a great deal to do before he is in a condition to ‘believe his own eyes’; but Nature teaches so gently, so gradually, so persistently, that he is never overdone, but goes on gathering little stores of knowledge about whatever comes before him.Charlotte M. Mason

Although the ready memory is a great blessing to its possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having once had to do with it, of its neighborhood, and of where we may go to recover it again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of their education.William James

One thing more: a single idea may be a possession so precious in itself, so fruitful, that the parent cannot fitly allow the child’s selection of ideas to be a matter of chance: his lessons should furnish him with such ideas as shall make for his further education.Charlotte M. Mason

To say that education is a social function, securing direction and development in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to which they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with the quality of life which prevails in a group.John Dewey

Eventually, he learns to read, somehow, by mere dint of repetition; but consider what an abuse of his intelligence is a system of teaching which makes him undergo daily labour with little or no result, and gives him a distaste for books before he has learned to use them.Charlotte M. Mason

But we are doubtless far from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a constructive agency of improving society, from realizing that it represents not only a development of children and youth but also of the future society of which they will be the constituents.John Dewey

The true Kindergärtnerin is the artist amongst teachers; she is filled with the inspiration of her work, and probably most sincere teachers have caught something from her fervour, some sense of the beauty of childhood, and of the enthralling delight of truly educational work.Charlotte M. Mason

Teachers, and even parents, who are careful enough about their children’s diet, are so reckless as to the sort of mental aliment offered to them, that I am exceedingly anxious to secure consideration for this question, of the lessons and literature proper for the little people.Charlotte M. Mason

The reason why mathematics are a great study is because there exists in the normal mind an affinity and capacity for this study; and too great an elaboration, whether of teaching or of preparation, has, I think, a tendency to take the edge off this manner of intellectual interest.Charlotte M. Mason

People are apt to overlook the fact that mind must have its aliment—we learn that we may know, not that we may grow; hence the parrot-like saying of lessons, the cramming of ill-digested facts for examinations, all the ways of taking in knowledge which the mind does not assimilate.Charlotte M. Mason

Of the teaching of Natural Philosophy, I will only remind the reader of what was said in an earlier chapter—that there is no part of a child’s education more important than that he should lay, by his own observation, a wide basis of facts towards scientific knowledge in the future.Charlotte M. Mason

The inequality of achievement between the mature and the immature not only necessitates teaching the young, but the necessity of this teaching gives an immense stimulus to reducing experience to that order and form which will render it most easily communicable and hence most usable.John Dewey

The genius of the interesting teacher consists in sympathetic divination of the sort of material with which the pupil's mind is likely to be already spontaneously engaged, and in the ingenuity which discovers paths of connection from that material to the matters to be newly learned.William James

The excesses of old-fashioned verbal memorizing, and the immense advantages of object-teaching in the earlier stages of culture, have perhaps led those who philosophize about teaching to an unduly strong reaction; and learning things by heart is now probably somewhat too much despised.William James

So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life.William James

She should know how to incite the child to effort through his desire of approbation, of excelling, of advancing, his desire of knowledge, his love of his parents, his sense of duty, in such a way that no one set of motives be called unduly into play to the injury of the child’s character.Charlotte M. Mason

If possible, let the children learn from the first under artists, lovers of their work: it is a serious mistake to let the child lay the foundation of whatever he may do in the future under ill-qualified mechanical teachers, who kindle in him none of the enthusiasm which is the life of art.Charlotte M. Mason

At the same time, the mother exercises the friendly vigilance of a guardian angel, being watchful, not to catch the child tripping, but to guide him into the acting out of the duty she has already made lovely in his eyes; for it is only as we do that we learn to do, and become strong in the doing.Charlotte M. Mason

The chief importance of this foregoing statement of the educative process which goes on willy-nilly is to lead us to note that the only way in which adults consciously control the kind of education which the immature get is by controlling the environment in which they act, and hence think and feel.John Dewey

The exercise of voluntary attention in the schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of training that take place there; and the first-rate teacher, by the keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence.William James

In its contrast with the ideas both of unfolding of latent powers from within, and of the formation from without, whether by physical nature or by the cultural products of the past, the ideal of growth results in the conception that education is a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience.John Dewey

Such measurements can give us useful information only when we combine them with observations made without brass instruments, upon the total demeanor of the measured individual, by teachers with eyes in their heads and common sense, and some feeling for the concrete facts of human nature in their hearts.William James

The mind would appear to be one and indivisible, and endowed with manifold powers; and this sort of doctoring of the material of knowledge is unnecessary for the healthy child, whose mind is capable of self-direction, and of applying itself to its proper work upon the parcel of knowledge delivered to it.Charlotte M. Mason

It is a delightful thing to have the memory stored with beautiful, comforting, and inspiring passages, and we cannot tell when and how this manner of seed may spring up, grow, and bear fruit; but the learning of the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, should not be laid on the children as a burden.Charlotte M. Mason

Men have long had some intimation of the extent to which education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious social evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce these ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may be made an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men.John Dewey

In the third place, it is the office of the school environment to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment.John Dewey

Compared with the youth taught by these methods, one brought up exclusively by books carries through life a certain remoteness from reality: he stands, as it were, out of the pale, and feels that he stands so; and often suffers a kind of melancholy from which he might have been rescued by a more real education.William James

They must be let alone, left to themselves a great deal, to take in what they can of the beauty of earth and heavens; for of the evils of modern education few are worse than this—that the perpetual cackle of his elders leaves the poor child not a moment of time, nor an inch of space, wherein to wonder—and grow.Charlotte M. Mason

That he should do sums is of comparatively small importance; but the use of those functions which ‘summing’ calls into play is a great part of education; so much so, that the advocates of mathematics and of language as instruments of education have, until recently, divided the field pretty equally between them.Charlotte M. Mason

Talk and write and draw on blackboard, permit the pupils to talk, and make them write and draw, exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your diagrams colored differently in their different parts, etc.; and out of the whole variety of impressions the individual child will find the most lasting ones for himself.William James

She can teach her child to be first without vanity, and to be last without bitterness; that is, she can bring him up in such a hearty outgoing of love and sympathy that joy in his brother’s success takes the sting out of his own failure, and regret for his brother’s failure leaves no room for self-glorification.Charlotte M. Mason

Before the reading for the day begins, the teacher should talk a little (and get the children to talk) about the last lesson, with a few words about what is to be read, in order that the children may be animated by expectation; but she should beware of explanation, and, especially, of forestalling the narrative.Charlotte M. Mason

It is in the fulfilment of the rule that the difficulty lies; for the difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dulness in discovering such transitions which the other shows.William James

Since some objects are natively interesting and in others interest is artificially acquired, the teacher must know which the natively interesting ones are; for, as we shall see immediately, other objects can artificially acquire an interest only through first becoming associated with some of these natively interesting things.William James

Upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of a form of social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration, makes a democratic community more interested than other communities have cause to be in deliberate and systematic education.John Dewey

Let the child alone, and he will learn the alphabet for himself: but few mothers can resist the pleasure of teaching it; and there is no reason why they should, for this kind of learning is no more than play to the child, and if the alphabet be taught to the little student, his appreciation of both form and sound will be cultivated.Charlotte M. Mason

The most colossal improvement which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the introduction of the manual training schools; not because they will give us a people more handy and practical for domestic life and better skilled in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an entirely different intellectual fibre.William James

A child will have taught himself to paint, paste, cut paper, knit, weave, hammer and saw, make lovely things in clay and sand, build castles with his bricks; possibly, too, will have taught himself to read, write, and do sums, besides acquiring no end of knowledge and notions about the world he lives in, by the time he is six or seven.Charlotte M. Mason

There is a sense of infinite potentiality in us all, when young, which makes some of us draw up lists of books we intend to read hereafter, and makes most of us think that we can easily acquaint ourselves with all sorts of things which we are now neglecting by studying them out hereafter in the intervals of leisure of our business lives.William James

Constructiveness is the instinct most active; and by the incessant hammering and sawing, and dressing and undressing dolls, putting of things together and taking them apart, the child not only trains the muscles to co-ordinate action, but accumulates a store of physical conceptions which are the basis of his knowledge of the material world through life.William James

No one wants to hear a lecture on a subject completely disconnected with his previous knowledge, but we all like lectures on subjects of which we know a little already, just as, in the fashions, every year must bring its slight modification of last year's suit, but an abrupt jump from the fashion of one decade into another would be distasteful to the eye.William James

When we are studying an uninteresting subject, if our mind tends to wander, we have to bring back our attention every now and then by using distinct pulses of effort, which revivify the topic for a moment, the mind then running on for a certain number of seconds or minutes with spontaneous interest, until again some intercurrent idea captures it and takes it off.William James

But it is obvious that in the usual schoolroom no such differentiation of appeal is possible; and the only really useful practical lesson that emerges from this analytic psychology in the conduct of large schools is the lesson already reached in a purely empirical way, that the teacher ought always to impress the class through as many sensible channels as he can.William James

Feed the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally communicated information.William James

Just so, in teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are.William James

When genius is able to lift the veil and show us a child, it does a service which, in our present state of thought, we are hardly able to appraise; and when genius or simplicity, or both, shall have given us enough such studies to generalise upon, we shall doubtless reconsider the whole subject, and shall be dismayed at the slights we have been putting upon children in the name of education.Charlotte M. Mason

We begin to see the lines we must go upon in teaching geography: for educative purposes, the child must learn such geography, and in such a way, that his mind shall thereby be stored with ideas, his imagination with images; for practical purposes he must learn such geography only as, the nature of his mind considered, he will able to remember; in other words, he must learn what interests him.Charlotte M. Mason

Mothers seldom talk down to their children; they are too intimate with the little people, and have, therefore, too much respect for them: but professional teachers, whether the writers of books or the givers of lessons, are too apt to present a single grain of pure knowledge in a whole gallon of talk, imposing upon the child the labour of discerning the grain and of extracting it from the worthless flood.Charlotte M. Mason

I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had in the wisdom of their teacher was truly marvellous.

W.E.B. Du Bois

In the case of the little child it is a question of aiding the natural evolution of voluntary action.

Maria Montessori

One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.

Malala Yousafzai

Reading was the only Amusement I allow'd myself.

Benjamin Franklin

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.

W.E.B. Du Bois

The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

Maria Montessori

By education must be understood the active help given to the normal expansion of the life of the child.

Maria Montessori

The pedagogical method of observation has for its base the liberty of the child; and liberty is activity.

Maria Montessori

The lesson must be presented in such a way that the personality of the teacher shall disappear.

Maria Montessori

A definite and undoubted part of the teacher's work is that of teaching an exact nomenclature.

Maria Montessori

Even an intelligent teacher, who understands the principle, finds much difficulty in putting it into practice.

Maria Montessori

Another characteristic quality of the lesson in the "Children's Houses" is its simplicity.

Maria Montessori

The child's unconscious aim was his own self-development; not the external fact of a pail full of little stones.

Maria Montessori

For all these reasons, the first form of educational intervention must tend to lead the child toward independence.

Maria Montessori

Indeed, nomenclature prepares for an exactness in the use of language which is not always met with in our schools.

Maria Montessori

And such is our duty toward the child: to give a ray of light and to go on our way.

Maria Montessori

We do not stop to think that the child who does not do, does not know how to do.

Maria Montessori

Children, who are undertaking something for the first time are extremely slow.

Maria Montessori

Now, child life is not an abstraction; it is the life of individual children.

Maria Montessori

The greatest triumph of our educational method should always be this: to bring about the spontaneous progress of the child.

Maria Montessori

And, since the child draws what he wishes, he reveals to us which are the objects that most strongly attract his attention.

Maria Montessori

The teacher should watch with the most solicitous care to see when and how the child arrives at this generalisation of ideas.

Maria Montessori

In regard to infant psychology, we are more richly endowed with prejudices than with actual knowledge bearing upon the subject.

Maria Montessori

The children select the colours and are left entirely free in their work.

Maria Montessori

If any educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of this life.

Maria Montessori

For, if she provokes the child to make an unnatural effort, she will no longer know what is the spontaneous activity of the child.

Maria Montessori

The liberty of the child should have as its limit the collective interest; as its form, what we universally consider good breeding.

Maria Montessori

We must give such help as shall make it possible for children to achieve the satisfaction of their own individual aims and desires.

Maria Montessori

In such cases, the children experience a joy at each fresh discovery.

Maria Montessori

To have learned something is for the child only a point of departure.

Maria Montessori

And herein lies the art of the educator; in knowing how to measure the action by which we help the young child's personality to develop.

Maria Montessori

Often (and this is another misconception) we think all we need to do, to obtain a voluntary action from a child, is to order him to do it.

Maria Montessori

The more fully the teacher is acquainted with the methods of experimental psychology, the better will she understand how to give the lesson.

Maria Montessori

The directress must intervene to lead the child from sensations to ideas—from the concrete to the abstract, and to the association of ideas.

Maria Montessori

The discipline to which the child habituates himself here is, in its character, not limited to the school environment but extends to society.

Maria Montessori

This brief and simple lesson must be considered by the teacher as an explanation of the object and of the use which the child can make of it.

Maria Montessori

It is remarkable how clearly individual differences show themselves, if we proceed in this way; the child, conscious and free, reveals himself.

Maria Montessori

In the giving of such lessons the fundamental guide must be the method of observation, in which is included and understood the liberty of the child.

Maria Montessori

The fact that the child must remember the colour of the objects represented in the design encourages him to observe those things which are about him.

Maria Montessori

To one whose attitude is right, little children soon reveal profound individual differences which call for very different kinds of help from the teacher.

Maria Montessori

Opportune and rational instruction prevents such an effort, and therefore does not weary, but relieves, the child and satisfies his desire for knowledge.

Maria Montessori

Here lies the essential point; from her scientific preparation, the teacher must bring not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena.

Maria Montessori

There exists only one real biological manifestation: the living individual; and toward single individuals, one by one observed, education must direct itself.

Maria Montessori

Any pedagogical action, if it is to be efficacious in the training of little children, must tend to help the children to advance upon this road of independence.

Maria Montessori

When a child has attained this stage, of repeating an exercise, he is on the way to self-development, and the external sign of this condition is his self-discipline.

Maria Montessori

So the teacher shall observe whether the child interests himself in the object, how he is interested in it, for how long, etc., even noticing the expression of his face.

Maria Montessori

And in preparing the lessons which she is to give, the teacher must pay special attention to this point, counting and weighing the value of the words which she is to speak.

Maria Montessori

It is necessary, therefore, that the teaching shall be rigorously guided by the principle of limiting to the greatest possible point the active intervention of the educator.

Maria Montessori

These clay models are undoubtedly very valuable material for the teacher, and make clear many individual differences, thus helping her to understand her children more fully.

Maria Montessori

Discipline is, therefore, not a fact but a path, a path in following which the child grasps the abstract conception of goodness with an exactitude which is fairly scientific.

Maria Montessori

We can not create observers by saying, " observe," but by giving them the power and the means for this observation, and these means are procured through education of the senses.

Maria Montessori

We should reflect upon the fact that many times a child, left to himself, makes an undue effort to comprehend the language of the adults and the meaning of the things about him.

Maria Montessori

The movements of the children from the state of order become always more co-ordinated and perfect with the passing of the days; in fact, they learn to reflect upon their own acts.

Maria Montessori

Work develops the child spiritually; but the child with a fuller spiritual development works better, and his improved work delights him,—hence he continues to develop spiritually.

Maria Montessori

The educator must be as one inspired by a deep worship of life, and must, through this reverence, respect, while he observes with human interest, the development of the child life.

Maria Montessori

So, after we have offered to the child such didactic material as is adapted to provoke the development of his senses, we must wait until the activity known as observation develops.

Maria Montessori

A room in which all the children move about usefully, intelligently, and voluntarily, without committing any rough or rude act, would seem to me a classroom very well disciplined indeed.

Maria Montessori

Thus the knowledge of the forms given him in the plane geometric insets will be for him a species of magic key, opening the external world, and making him feel that he knows its secrets.

Maria Montessori

So the spontaneous psychic development of the child continues indefinitely and is in direct relation to the psychic potentiality of the child himself, and not with the work of the teacher.

Maria Montessori

In our efforts with the child, external acts are the means which stimulate internal development, and they again appear as its manifestation, the two elements being inextricably intertwined.

Maria Montessori

But when the child has failed, we should know that he was not at that instant ready for the psychic association which we wished to provoke in him, and we must therefore choose another moment.

Maria Montessori

At a given moment it happens that a child becomes keenly interested in a piece of work, showing it by the expression of his face, by his intense attention, by his perseverance in the same exercise.

Maria Montessori

No one can be free unless he is independent: therefore, the first, active manifestations of the child's individual liberty must be so guided that through this activity he may arrive at independence.

Maria Montessori

The teacher must at least have attended the training classes in the "Children's Houses," in order to acquire a knowledge of the fundamental principles of the method and to understand their application.

Maria Montessori

In fact, by revealing the error we may lead the child to make an undue effort to remember, or we may discourage him, and it is our duty to avoid as much as possible all unnatural effort and all depression.

Maria Montessori

Since, when a command to do a certain thing is given, we presuppose a corresponding active or inhibitive power of the child, it is plain that obedience must follow the formation of the will and of the mind.

Maria Montessori

The instruction given to little children should be so directed as to lessen this expenditure of poorly directed effort, converting it instead into the enjoyment of conquest made easy and infinitely broadened.

Maria Montessori

The teacher must always test whether or not her lesson has attained the end she had in view, and her tests must be made to come within the restricted field of consciousness, provoked by the lesson on nomenclature.

Maria Montessori

For this reason, I have wished to make my work broad, leading the child, not only to observe the forms about him, but to distinguish the work of man from that of nature, and to appreciate the fruits of human labour.

Maria Montessori

But if we cut away the artificiality with which we have enwrapped them, and the violence through which we have foolishly thought to discipline them, they will reveal themselves to us in all the truth of child nature.

Maria Montessori

The teacher moves quietly about, goes to any child who calls her, supervising operations in such a way that any one who needs her finds her at his elbow, and whoever does not need her is not reminded of her existence.

Maria Montessori

In our system, she must become a passive, much more than an active, influence, and her passivity shall be composed of anxious scientific curiosity, and of absolute respect for the phenomenon which she wishes to observe.

Maria Montessori

These are the first outlines of an experiment which shows a form of indirect discipline in which there is substituted for the critical and sermonizing teacher a rational organisation of work and of liberty for the child.

Maria Montessori

Who does not know that to teach a child to feed himself, to wash and dress himself, is a much more tedious and difficult work, calling for infinitely greater patience, than feeding, washing and dressing the child one's self?

Maria Montessori

From a biological point of view, the concept of liberty in the education of the child in his earliest years must be understood as demanding those conditions adapted to the most favourable development of his entire individuality.

Maria Montessori

We must help them to learn to walk without assistance, to run, to go up and down stairs, to lift up fallen objects, to dress and undress themselves, to bathe themselves, to speak distinctly, and to express their own needs clearly.

Maria Montessori

A special technique is necessary to the teacher who is to lead the child along such a path of discipline, if she is to make it possible for him to continue in this way all his life, advancing indefinitely toward perfect self-mastery.

Maria Montessori

Our educational aim with very young children must be to aid the spontaneous development of the mental, spiritual, and physical personality, and not to make of the child a cultured individual in the commonly accepted sense of the term.

Maria Montessori

The teacher, in other words, when she gives a lesson must seek to limit the field of the child's consciousness to the object of the lesson, as, for example, during sense education she isolated the sense which she wished the child to exercise.

Maria Montessori

Since the child now learns to move rather than to sit still, he prepares himself not for the school, but for life; for he becomes able, through habit and through practice, to perform easily and correctly the simple acts of social or community life.

Maria Montessori

Once we have aroused such activity, auto-education is assured, for refined well-trained senses lead us to a closer observation of the environment, and this, with its infinite variety, attracts the attention and continues the psychosensory education.

Maria Montessori

In that long preparation, the child experiences joys, spiritual awakenings and pleasures which form his inner treasure-house—the treasure-house in which he is steadily storing up the sweetness and strength which will be the sources of righteousness.

Maria Montessori

Actual training and practice are necessary to fit for this method teachers who have not been prepared for scientific observation, and such training is especially necessary to those who have been accustomed to the old domineering methods of the common school.

Maria Montessori

To the casual onlooker the child seems to be learning exactitude and grace of action, to be refining his senses, to be learning how to read and write; but much more profoundly he is learning how to become his own master, how to be a man of prompt and resolute will.

Maria Montessori

That the teacher must not lose herself in vain words, is included in the first quality of conciseness; this second, then, is closely related to the first: that is, the carefully chosen words must be the most simple it is possible to find, and must refer to the truth.

Maria Montessori

This idea, that life acts of itself, and that in order to study it, to divine its secrets or to direct its activity, it is necessary to observe it and to understand it without intervening—this idea, I say, is very difficult for anyone to assimilate and to put into practice.

Maria Montessori

However, as a calm man and a self-disciplined man are not one and the same, so here the fact which manifests itself externally by the calm of the children is in reality a phenomenon merely physical and partial compared to the real self-discipline which is being developed in them.

Maria Montessori

It is exactly in the repetition of the exercises that the education of the senses consists; their aim is not that the child shall know colours, forms and the different qualities of objects, but that he refine his senses through an exercise of attention, of comparison, of judgment.

Maria Montessori

The method which is the subject of this book contains in every part an exercise for the will-power, when the child completes co-ordinated actions directed towards a given end, when he achieves something he set out to do, when he repeats patiently his exercises, he is training his positive will-power.

Maria Montessori

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity, as often happens in the case of the old-time discipline.

Maria Montessori

Given the fact that, through the régime of liberty the pupils can manifest their natural tendencies in the school, and that with this in view we have prepared the environment and the materials (the objects with which the child is to work), the teacher must not limit her action to observation, but must proceed to experiment.

Maria Montessori

Now (with the idea of order understood by the children) the observation of the way in which the children pass from the first disordered movements to those which are spontaneous and ordered—this is the book of the teacher; this is the book which must inspire her actions; it is the only one in which she must read and study if she is to become a real educator.

Maria Montessori