Leonard Susskind Quotes

You can't teach someone to be imaginative.

Every time you do a project, you learn something new.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

The human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.

I am never satisfied until I can make a mathematical model of what I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand. If I cannot, I do not understand.

The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.

I feel like I learn in every project.

I re-read the books I assign to my students. Each time I do, I learn something new.

One rule of invention: before you can invent it, you have to imagine it.

Eighty percent of my job is to ask the question, 'If this were real, what would it look like?'

I think books make you think in a different way than movies and documentaries.

Skills acquisition is really at the heart of what it means to learn.

I learn from teaching. Having to break things down and explain them makes me a better dancer.

When I'm problem-solving with something, I have, effectively, a CAD program in my head that's like a room that has specific qualities to it that I go to some deal of effort to populate. Textures and smells, something like that.

I teach some of the guys stuff that I've learned.

What is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn?

The number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn.

Profound ignorance makes a man dogmatic. The man who knows nothing thinks he is teaching others what he has just learned himself; the man who knows a great deal can't imagine that what he is saying is not common knowledge, and speaks more indifferently.

In my basic courses I have always tried to develop discovery and invention which, in my opinion, are the criteria of creativeness.

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself... The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?

We can teach only if we are willing to learn.

Teaching someone that doesn't know something forces you to think about almost every single aspect of it, including parts of it that you could sort of take for granted.

Experience teaches us only one thing at a time - and hardly that, in my case.

Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.

One may receive the information but miss the teaching.