Exploratory Learning Quotes

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers.

A free curiosity is more effective in learning than a rigid discipline.

The essence of education is not to transfer knowledge; it is to guide the learning process, to put responsibility for study in the student's own hands...[and] place people on their own path of discovery and invention.

Our great mistake in education is ... the worship of book-learning-the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. ... We ought to follow exactly the opposite course with children-to give them a wholesome variety of mental food, and endeavour to cultivate their tastes, rather than to fill their minds with dry facts.

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.

Taste, when once obtained, may be said to be no acquiring faculty, and must remain stationary; but knowledge is of perpetual growth and has infinite demands. Taste, like an artificial canal, winds through a beautiful country, but its borders are confined and its term is limited. Knowledge navigates the ocean, and is perpetually on voyages of discovery.

Creative people do not belong in the university because the process is antithetical to the analytical process so necessary for proper scholarship.

The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered.

It's a mistake to get too narrow too fast. Kids today, many of them will live past 100, and you cant predict what you might work on. The things you're passionate about and interested in, get experience with them by going deep on projects. I would encourage science projects, plays. Pursue science, math, writing, history - the 21st century demands a lot of cross-disciplinary thinking.

You don't actually need to know anything, you can find out at the point when you need to know it. It's the teachers job to point young minds towards the right kind of question, a teacher doesn't need to give any answers because answers are everywhere.

Children whose curiosity survives parental discipline and who manage to grow up before they blow up are invited to join the Yale faculty. Within the university they go on asking their questions and trying to find the answers ... it is a place where the world's hostility to curiosity can be defied.

Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life?

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves.

Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.

A big part of engaging kids in science is not getting the single, correct answer; it's being willing to work with students to discover the correct answer.

I started by just sitting by the chessboard exploring things. I didn't even have books at first, and I just played by myself. I learnt a lot from that, and I feel that it is a big reason why I now have a good intuitive understanding of chess.

You're never going to learn something as profoundly as when it's purely out of curiosity

When the child goes out, it is the world itself that offers itself to him. Let us take the child out to show him real things instead of making objects which represent ideas and closing them up in cupboards.

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

The greatest teacher is just going out and playing.

What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child's education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life.

I am still a learner, not a teacher, feeding somewhat omnivorously, browsing both stalk & leaves

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.

The child can only develop fully by means of experience in his environment. We call such experience 'work'.