A Collection of Quotes on True Learning

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."

~ Plutarch

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"Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop."

~ Ovid

(The complete opposite of rat-race schooling.)

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"There can be no education without leisure; and without leisure, education is worthless."

~ Sarah Josepha Hale

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If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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“Birds don’t go to flight school.” ~ Linda Dobson

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Love does not dominate; it cultivates. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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"It is easier for a teacher to command than to teach."

~ John Locke

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“Children do not need us to shape them; they need us to respond to who they are.”

Naomi Aldort

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If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood
and don't assign them tasks and work but rather, teach them to long for
the endless immensity of the sea.

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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"The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil
with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron."

~ Horace Mann

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"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind."

~ Plato

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A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

~ Samuel Johnson

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"Do not train children to learn by force and harshness, but direct them
to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover
with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each."

~ Plato

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When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

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Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.

~ Winston Churchill

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“The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.”

~ Simone Weil

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I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun.

~ Thomas A. Edison

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If there is anything that a man can do well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance.

~ Abraham Lincoln

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Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.

~ Maria Montessori

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"Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned."

~ Mark Twain

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"I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught."

~ Winston Churchill

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"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

~ Albert Einstein

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“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

~ Mark Twain

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"It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen
to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings,
or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you
want to read poetry."

~ John Taylor Gatto

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"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching,
but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself."

~ George Bernard Shaw

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“Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but
had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.”

~ John Updike

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"I was undisciplined by birth, never would I bend, even in my tender youth, to a rule. It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water."

~ Claude Monet

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“Education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.”

~ John Dewey

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Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself. - John Dewey

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There is no difference between living and learning. - John Holt

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As a child lives today, he will live tomorrow. - John Dewey

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Since we can't know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.

~ John Holt

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“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook.”

~ Henry David Thoreau

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“Artificial learning takes what is simple and natural and turns it into a complex array of objectives, goals, measurements, administrators, supervisors, counselors, and transportation experts. Natural education requires only a guide providing direction, and a learner ready to discover and create goals and values that are personally meaningful.”

~ Linda Dobson

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Learning is a kind of natural food for the mind. - Cicero

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“Because schools suffocate children’s hunger to learn, learning appears to be difficult and we assume that children must be externally motivated to do it.”

~ Wendy Priesnitz

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The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure...
severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives
them away from the material being studied.

~ John Holt

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"Teaching does not make learning…organized education operates on the assumption that
children learn only when and only what and only because we teach them. This is not
true. It is very close to 100% false. Learners make learning.”

~ John Holt

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“The best function of the school in my head, as it turns out, is to remind me where not to dwell.

I did my time in and around school, and learned things painstakingly and grudgingly that my children later learned while laughing and playing and singing.”

~ Sandra Dodd

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"We're drowning in information and starving for knowledge."

~ Rutherford Rogers

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"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."

~ Albert Einstein

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My education was interrupted only by my schooling.

~ Winston Churchill

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"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child."

~ George Santayana

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"I can't give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma."

~ L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

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"It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated."

~ Alec Bourne

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The best instruction is that which uses the least words sufficient for the task.

~ Maria Montessori

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I know of nothing more inspiring than that of making discoveries for one's self.

~ George Washington Carver

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“Where is the wisdom lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge lost in information?”

~ T. S. Eliot

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“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” ~ Albert Einstein

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Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

~ Albert Einstein

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The Possible's slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination.

~ Emily Dickinson

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To invent you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

~ Thomas Edison

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“If you don’t make mistakes, you aren’t really trying.” ~ Coleman Hawkins

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Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

~ Winston Churchill

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"When was the last time you saw a tombstone with SAT scores inscribed on it?"

~ Edward B. Fiske

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“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship
of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement
and mystery of the world we live in.”

~ Rachel Carson

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"Childhood has it's own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and
nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs."

~ Jean Jacques Rousseau

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It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

~ Frederick Douglass

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When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is,
and respect for what he may become.

~ Louis Pasteur

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“My job is not to teach at all, but to find the opportunities for my kids to learn. NOT knowing something can be an advantage, as it reminds me of the wealth of resources out there in the community and world, if only we are willing to go look for them.”

~ David Albert

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“Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school.”

~ John Holt

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Children are born passionately eager to make as much sense as they can of things around them. If we attempt to control, manipulate, or divert this process...the independent scientist in the child disappears.

~ John Holt

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"Children don’t need to be taught how to learn; they are born learners. They come out of the womb interacting with and exploring their surroundings. Babies are active learners, their burning curiosity motivating them to learn how the world works. And if they are given a safe, supportive environment, they will continue to learn hungrily and naturally – in the manner and at the speed that suits them best."

~ Wendy Priesnitz

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All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words: Trust Children.
Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.

~ John Holt, in "How Children Learn"

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“If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued.”

~ John Holt