Learning Potential Quotes

You can't fix stupid. There's not a pill you can take, or a class you can go to.

There is a strange fact about the human mind, a fact that differentiates the mind sharply from the body. The body is limited in ways that the mind is not. One sign of this is that the body does not continue indefinitely to grow in strength and develop in skill and grace. By the time most people are thirty years old, their bodies are as good as they will ever be; in fact, many persons' bodies have begun to deteriorate by that time. But there is no limit to the amount of growth and development that the mind can sustain. The mind does not stop growing at any particular age.

Old men are always young enough to learn with profit.

I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.

The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.

I saw as a teacher how, if you take that spark of learning that those children have, and you ignite it, you can take a child from any background to a lifetime of creativity and accomplishment.

Experience burned into me the conviction that access to education ought to be based on how much you are willing to learn and how hard you are willing to work, not on how many dollars your family has in their bank account.

The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges.

Rather than saying, 'I can't do this,' 'Sesame Street' encourages us to say, 'I can't do this... yet!' That one word changes everything. It emphasizes that your capability isn't fixed. It highlights the reality that our brain is like a muscle.

There is a satisfactory and available power in every one to learn drawing if he wishes, just as nearly all persons have the power of learning French, Latin or arithmetic, in a decent and useful degree.

The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers

A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of America. There your children's lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal.

Just because we're stupid doesn't mean everybody else was.

If the education and studies of children were suited to their inclinations and capacities, many would be made useful members of society that otherwise would make no figure in it.

Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste was the slogan, but now it's 95 and it's don't forget the Trojan.

Knowledge above the average can be crammed into the average man, but it remains dead, and in the last analysis sterile knowledge. The result is a man who may be a living dictionary but nevertheless falls down miserably in all special situations and decisive moments in life.

All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think.

The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do.

Your grades are not your destiny: they're just letters and numbers which rate how well you performed in one artificial arena, once.

A Man of Knowledge like a rich Soil, feeds If not a world of Corn, a world of Weeds.

Those who have not distinguished themselves at school need not on that account be discouraged. the greatest minds do not necessarily ripen the quickest.

Each child should be more intelligent than his parents.

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. Our requirements for world leadership, our hopes for economic growth, and the demands of citizenship itself in an era such as this all require the maximum development of every young American's capacity. The human mind is our fundamental resource.