Passive Learning Quotes

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.

I went to religious schools. I wasn't that enthusiastic, by and large, but it sunk in.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

Schools teach the need to be taught.

I'm sort of an osmotic fellow.

If we truly want to learn, we never learn when we are talking. We only learn when we are listening.

Television is basically teaching whether you want it to or not.

The average mind is easily content with inherited and acquired things, or with the dicta of parents and teachers, because it is much easier to imitate than to create.

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 think one of the problems [with raising intelligent children] is compulsory schooling...and that children are sitting there and they are taught and told what to believe. They are passive from the very beginning, and one must be very, very aggressive intellectually to have a high IQ [...] the child is taught. Right from the beginning, it's a passive process. He or she sits there, and they simply try to believe everything they're told.

I learned a lot just watching people perform.

Many students learn best by doing. But because classrooms force the same pace on all students, they limit the degree to which students can truly learn through trial and error. Instead, lectures still force many students to follow material passively and in lockstep pace.

A lecture is an occasion when you numb one end to benefit the other.

I'm somebody who doesn't feel the need to be in the driver's seat all the time. I appreciate the perspective of being in the passenger's seat sometimes, and I feel fortunate for that because I've learned a lot from that perspective.

The Chinese are brought up to believe that you should be silent in class. The teacher speaks, and you just listen and absorb what they say.

The problem is the average person isnt tuned in to lifelong learning, or going to seminars and so forth. If the information is not on television, and its not in the movies they watch, and its not in the few books that they buy, they dont get it.

By the consultation of books, whether of dead or living authors, many temptations to petulance and opposition, which occur in oral conferences, are avoided. An author cannot obtrude his service unasked, nor can be often suspected of any malignant intention to insult his readers with his knowledge or his wit. Yet so prevalent is the habit of comparing ourselves with others, while they remain within the reach of our passions, that books are seldom read with complete impartiality, but by those from whom the writer is placed at such a distance that his life or death is indifferent.

I might be more fluent in Swedish than I am in Spanish. My wife speaks it to our kids, and they're fluent so I hear it all the time, so I've got that under my belt.

I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.

If I'm going to learn, I must do it by listening.

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

You can learn so much just by observing.

They (teenage boys)don’t really listen to speeches or talks. They absorb incrementally, through hours and hours of observation.

The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.

That education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about.