David Elkind Quotes

I think kids slowly begin to realize that what they're learning relates to other things they know. Then learning starts to get more and more exciting.

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.

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.

If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little.

Children ask questions much more than adults do, and you have to wonder if this is something we have that we lose.

Our kids are our biggest assets. They are the future of our country. If we provide them good education, no one can stop India from becoming a developed country.

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.

A problem of future research is to clarify how young children learn what type of social comparative information is most useful for efficacy evaluation

Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.

Play permits the child to resolve in symbolic form unsolved problems of the past and to cope directly or symbolically with present concerns. It is also his most significant tool for preparing himself for the future and its tasks.

From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

The traditional educational theory is to the effect that the way to bring up children is to keep them innocent (i.e., believing in biological, political, and socioeconomic fairy tales) as long as possible ... that students should be given the best possible maps of the territories of experience in order that they may be prepared for life, is not as popular as might be assumed.

While parents possess the original key to their offspring's experience, teachers have a spare key. They, too, can open or close the minds and hearts of children.

Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.

It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.

The relationships of our present social life are so numerous and so interwoven that a child placed in the most favorable position could not readily share in many of the most important of them. Not sharing in them, their meaning would not be communicated to him, would not become a part of his own mental disposition. There would be no seeing the trees because of the forest. Business, politics, art, science, religion, would make all at once a clamor for attention; confusion would be the outcome.

Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.

That's why I'm concerned about education, because it helps our children see other worlds. Education is my next big thing. When music and art were taken out of the schools, I went berserk!

Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.

The development of a child is guaranteed in his curiosity to discover the cause behind each and every incident.

Knowing what we must do is neither fundamental nor difficult, but to comprehend which presumptions and vain prejudices we must rid ourselves of in order to be able to educate our children is most difficult.

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

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up.

Merely to stuff the child with a lot of information, making him pass examinations, is the most unintelligent form of education.

Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us.