I always believe that a person can learn so much by just jumping into something and trying to do it rather than having someone else teach you everything.
I don't learn as well, I think, in like a structured way. I kind of have to be thrown into it.
Joseph Campbell, who when asked what spiritual practice he followed said, "I underline books." Me too.
Long is the road to learning by precepts, but short and successful by examples.
If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise how difficult it is!
I'm better learning by somebody showing me something. I got to see and then do it. You can't be scared to ask for help.
I learn in a different way. I learn experientially.
Read much, but not many works.
My parents would say to me, 'You can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you.' That was the whole ethos of my family.
The natural tendency of children is to solve problems, but we try to indoctrinate them with facts, which they are supposed to feed back, and then we fail them. And that's child abuse. And you should never raise children that way. You should cultivate and encourage their natural tendencies to create solutions to the problems around them.
Learning in our family was entirely self-directed.
For my part, I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew.
I'm very simple. I have to be. I'm not very smart. I start broad, then go deep where I'm interested.
We think scientific literacy flows out of how many science facts can you recite rather than how was your brain wired for thinking. And it's the brain wiring that I'm more interested in rather than the facts that come out of the curriculum or the lesson plan that's been proposed.
What we tell students in formal schooling: “Sit down, stay quiet, and absorb. Do this for 12 to 16 years and all will be well.
I have studied the child. I have taken what the child has given me and expressed it and that is what is called the Montessori method.
Almost everyone shuts down when science becomes too technical; you've got to infuse it with entertainment and storytelling to make it effective. From high school on, science is taught in a very dry manner, which isn't as potent.
I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.
It is not true that I invented what is called the Montessori Method... I have studied the child; I have taken what the child has given me and expressed it, and that is what is called the Montessori Method.
I'm more of a creative learner, ... I do very well in projects, but I was not good at memorizing all of that material in the introductory courses.
We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.
Do not offer the child the content of the mind, but the order for that content.
I discovered early on that the player who learned the fundamentals of basketball is going to have a much better chance of succeeding and rising through the levels of competition than the player who was content to do things his own way. A player should be interested in learning why things are done a certain way. The reasons behind the teaching often go a long way to helping develop the skill.
The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)
I have somewhere seen it observed that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it.
