Sal Khan Quotes

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

We are taught words, not ideas.

In our education system, we are taught to munch figures and remember them for lifetime. But does it help? We are not taught how to make decisions.

I have five, six, seven things I do before those lines are in my brain. I say them like I'm a robot; I sing them. I put a pencil in my mouth, and I say them. I cook. I play with a cushion and say them - so they really are inside of me.

I think there's so much negative influence on children in school settings. It becomes learning by rote to pass a test. It's not contextualized.

In most schools, we measure children on what they know. By and large, they have to memorize the content of whatever test is coming up. Because measuring the results of rote learning is easy, rote prevails. What kids know is just not important in comparison with whether they can think.

The relation of repetitions for learning and for repeating English stanzas needs no amplification. These were learned by heart on the first day with less than half of the repetitions necessary for the shortest of the syllable series.

Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse.

Education today is a process of filling the mind with the contents of books, emptying the contents in the examination hall and returning empty-headed.

We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think.

The eight laws of learning are explanation, demonstration, imitation, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition.

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.

Academic education is the act of memorizing things read in books, and things told by college professors who got their education mostly by memorizing things read in books.

Actually, most mathematics courses do not teach reasoning of any kind. Students are so baffled by the material that they are obliged to memorize in order to pass examinations.

I'm always trying to memorize lines, whether I understand them or not.

As a child, I learned hundreds of poems by heart, which I can recite to this day.

A good traditional conceptual instruction is what I got from my better professors at MIT. They would be at a chalkboard, and they would literally be explaining something and working through a problem, but it wasn't rote. They were explaining the underlying theory and processes and intuition behind it.

I've got an awful memory, and I can't read or write, but you can read me a script once or twice, and I've got it.

My father's schooling during the 1930s was heavy with memorization; eight decades later, he is reaping the benefits.

When I see a play one time, I've got it. When I see it twice, I master it. When I see it three times, I know where the loopholes are.

The nature of education fundamentally has not changed in a century - and I say this as someone whose parents are both teachers.

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!" "Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

Words learn'd by rote a parrot may rehearse, But talking is not always to converse, Not more distinct from harmony divine The constant creaking of a country sign.

Teachers may think they are stuffing minds, but all they are ever affecting is the memory. Nothing can ever be forced into anyone's mind except by brainwashing, which is the very opposite of genuine teaching.