Maryanne Wolf Quotes

It's not my job to tell people what to think. If I can actually in some way help the readers' own creative thinking, then that's got to be to everybody's benefit.

As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.

The point of a philosophical spirit is to rely primarily upon one's own thinking.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

The evidence that I see around me in society indicates that not only is thinking very much out of favor, but I'm not sure that the last couple of generations - Generation X and Generation Next, or whatever you want to call them - even know what a thought is, having been raised to be women.

Education should prepare our minds to use its own powers of reason and conception rather than filling it with the accumulated misconceptions of the past.

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.

I have always found myself trying to study and analyze the world around me - not just taking everything for granted and following whatever is popular.

Children's ability to learn is infinite when they are engaged.

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

I had always been scrupulously careful to avoid the smallest suggestion of infant indoctrination, which I think is ultimately responsible for much of the evil in the world. Others, less close to her, showed no such scruples, which upset me, as I very much wanted her, as I want all children, to make up her own mind freely when she became old enough to do so. I would encourage her to think, without telling her what to think.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

I think one of the problems [with raising intelligent children] is compulsory schooling...and that children are sitting there and they are taught and told what to believe. They are passive from the very beginning, and one must be very, very aggressive intellectually to have a high IQ [...] the child is taught. Right from the beginning, it's a passive process. He or she sits there, and they simply try to believe everything they're told.

Being able to "go beyond the information" given to "figure things out" is one of the few untarnishable joys of life.

I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them.

We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think.

No thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told it is to the one to whom it is told another fact, not an idea. The communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for himself and to think out a like idea, or it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought. But what he directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think.

It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.

The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.

It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself.

Don’t just teach your children to read… Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.

I don't ever want to be the type of person to tell you what to think or what to believe. Whatever stage in your life that you are in, I want you to organically reach whatever conclusions that you possibly reach.

How hard would it be to ask children what they see in their heads? How big should the house be in comparison to the family standing in front of it? What is it about the anatomy of the people that doesn't look right? Then let them try it again. Teach them to learn how to see and ask questions.