John Taylor Gatto Quotes

My biggest asset is that I know how to learn, and that, I believe, will help me in the long run.

In a world that is constantly changing, there is no one subject or set of subjects that will serve you for the foreseeable future, let alone for the rest of your life. The most important skill to acquire now is learning how to learn.

Who knows what technology will emerge in the next five years, let alone 20. Yet the education we provide our children now is supposed to last for decades. We cannot train them for jobs that do not even exist yet, but we can provide them with the minds and tools they'll need to adapt to our ever-changing set of circumstances.

I am an engineer, but what I find important and necessary is that you just learn things as you go along.

The willingness to learn new skills is very high.

I think that if you keep your eyes and your ears open and you are receptive to learning, there are skills you can get from any job at all.

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.

So key for making smart decisions is a mindset that actively monitors and is open to shifting tides and new information, one that is acutely aware that the interplay between our environment and its outcomes is ever in flux.

The most important skill you need is the ability to learn how to change and grow.

A Princeton education sets you up for life: you have learned how to learn, and at a time when technology has changed everything, you will constantly have to learn.

When you build your network, keep yourself open to new ideas, concepts, and theories. Some of them may even contradict and challenge long-held points of view. This isn't beneficial only to someone in my profession, but to every line of work.

I am learning on every job I do. There is something new every time.

By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: 'The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction — how to teach himself. Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.'

I like situations that force me to rethink things.

Precedents are treated by powerful minds as fetters with which to bind down the weak, as reasons with which to mistify the moderately informed, and as reeds which they themselves fearlessly break through whenever new combinations and difficult emergencies demand their highest efforts.

Never...stop at the boundaries of what you think your knowledge or training would suggest. If a problem grabs you, run with it and try to understand it from beginning to end, even if that means learning new techniques or developing them yourself.

Education does not take place when you learn something you did not know before. Education is your ability to use what you have learned to be better today than you were yesterday.

Accepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn't work out, whether through luck or misjudgment. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without a struggle.

Put aside your need for a step-by-step manual and instead realize that analogies are your best friend.

Change your mind as often as possible. Just because you thought something yesterday doesn't mean you have to think it today. Don't ever become a prisoner of your own opinion

The old economy was about people acquiring a single skill for life; the new economy is about life-long learning.

Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined.

To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.

Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.

Sit down before facts as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion — or you shall learn nothing.