Herbert Spencer Quotes

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

In a world in which the total of human knowledge is doubling about every ten years, our security can rest only on our ability to learn.

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power

Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

There is hardly a more heart-thrilling pleasure enjoyed by mortals, than that which parents feel when seeing their child first being able to 'catch knowledge of objects.

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

So while it is true that children are exposed to more information and a greater variety of experiences than were children of the past, it does not follow that they automatically become more sophisticated. We always know much more than we understand, and with the torrent of information to which young people are exposed, the gap between knowing and understanding, between experience and learning, has become even greater than it was in the past.

Children are the most learning-hungry beings in the world.

Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.

Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.

All teaching and all intellectual learning come about from already existing knowledge.

To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.

I operate better with education and awareness, like I think all of us do.

There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves. It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to our children.

Whenever the child is given the notion that he needs to be entertained, learning comes almost to a halt.

Content if hence th' unlearn'd their wants may view, The learn'd reflect on what before they knew.

There is a good deal of excellent research on child's play. It has shown conclusively that through play, with the freedom of action it allows and the stressless environment in which it occurs, children discover, relate to and define themselves and their world. ...It is, therefore, paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play.

Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime.

One who knows nothing can understand nothing.

Learning makes the wise wiser and the fool more foolish.

Book - Learning : The dunce's derisive term for all knowledge that transcends his own impertinent ignorance.

Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind.