Hermann Hesse Quotes

For a small child there is no division between playing and learning; between the things he or she does just for fun and things that are educational. The child learns while living and any part of living that is enjoyable is also play.

I never had a teacher, and I never had lessons, other than hard Nature itself.

No one tells a child how to see, especially in the early years. They learn this through real-world experiences and examples.

I certainly didn't learn anything in school. My education was the world.

I have a conviction that a few weeks spent in a well organized summer camp may be of more value educationally than a whole year of formal school work.

There are two schools. The school where you go and open a book, and then there's the school of life. When you learn hands-on, often you don't understand why you do what you do and what's the word for that action.

This is the Wilderness School. 'Where the Kids are animals

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.

If we do not pay for children in good schools, then we are going to pay for them in prisons and mental hospitals.

Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature

Everyone goes to rotten schools when they're kids, don't they?

Question four: What book would you give to every child? Answer: I wouldn't give them a book. Books are part of the problem: this strange belief that a tree has nothing to say until it is murdered, its flesh pulped, and then (human) people stain this flesh with words. I would take children outside and put them face to face with chipmunks, dragonflies, tadpoles, hummingbirds, stones, rivers, trees, crawdads. That said, if you're going to force me to give them a book, it would be The Wind In The Willows, which I hope would remind them to go outside.

You'll learn more from your accidents than anything that you could ever learn at school.

Education perverts the mind since we are directly opposing the natural development of our mind by obtaining ideas first and observations last. This is why so few men of learning have such sound common sense as is quite common among the illiterate.

The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.

The school of life embodies a compulsory education that no man escapes.

The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.

It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book.

One of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is high-quality early education.

The education of even a small child, therefore, does not aim at preparing him for school, but for life.

in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.

It will help at every state along the road to learning. For the pre-school years we will help needy children become aware of the excitement of learning.

Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees, along roads by observing the formation of clouds, in the studio by studying the model, everywhere except in the schools.

That best academy, a mother's knee.

Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education.