in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.
My mantra was to educate people - to actually give them the know-how they could use - and to do it in a very subversive kind of way. I would entertain them, and I was going to teach them whether they knew it or not.
I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.
Most of the most important experiences that truly educate cannot be arranged ahead of time with any precision.
Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.
Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned.
I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.
Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
I don't intentionally eavesdrop. I'm not looking for salacious gossip, I'm just looking for vocabulary items.
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of histuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop- windows.
