A Commonplace Book

"Memorization is a function of duty; knowledge comes only from love."

For a man learns more quickly and remembers more easily that which he laughed at, than that which he approves and than that which he approves and reveres.

If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

I think of Koyukon elders, who have spent their lifetimes studying every detail of their natural surroundings, and have combined this with knowledge passed down from generations of elders before them. The more people experience the repetitions of events in nature, the more they see in them and the more they know, but the more they realize the limitation of their understanding. I believe this is why Koyukon people are so humble and self-effacing about their knowledge. And I believe that Koyukon people's extraordinary relationship to their natural community has emerged through this careful watching of the same events in the same place, endlessly repeated over lifetimes and generations and millennia. There may be more to learn by climbing the same mountain a hundred times than by climbing a hundred different mountains.

"You ain't gonna send him to school? There's nothing he's gonna learn there but how to get along with other kids under completely weird conditions.... Had my way, no kid would learn an abstract word till they was ten years old. Wouldn't get their minds so gummed up."

The great teachers don't teach.

The group experience exposed them to the processes of working together, developing a consensus and taking joint responsibility for completing a project.... They did not sit in rows of seats facing a lecturing teacher. Rather they worked at clusters of desks grouped around a large open space, a less-regimented arrangement better suited to small groups. they did not memorize facts mainly for the purpose of taking tests. They did not, in short, behave like human microchips being programmed for a robotic adulthood.

An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment.

The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. . . No man is so wise but that he may learn some wisdom from his past errors, either of thought or action, and no society has made such advances as to be capable of no improvement from the retrospect of its past folly and credulity.

Pleasurable experiences are fine, but if you don't remember them, you get that pleasure only once, and you can't even be sure of that. Memory has an important function for people.... We talk a great deal about learning from experience, but from which experiences? We don't ordinarily think about learning from eating a meal, but learning from the meal is one reason we eat it. A more important reason, of course, is that we are hungry.

Anyone who imagines he can prescribe a mode of thought to another must be quite out of his senses.... It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.

Education is not given for the purpose of earning a living; it's learning what to do with a living after you've earned it.

In practice, however, computers make our worst educational nightmares come true. While we bemoan the decline of literacy, computers discount words in favor of pictures and pictures in favor of video. While we fret about the decreasing cogency of public debate, computers dismiss linear argument and promote fast, shallow romps across the information landscape. While we worry about basic skills, we allow into the classroom software that will do a student's arithmetic or correct his spelling.

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will.... An education which should include this faculty would be the education par excellence.

[A] recent study of 10,000 community college students in California found that, in the 18-25-year age group, just 17% of the men could acquire information efficiently through reading text.... The figure for women in the same age group is a bit higher: just under 35% can learn well from textually presented information. These figures contrast with those for students aged 35 or over: 27% of males and over 42% of females find it natural to learn from reading.... [I]f the difference between the figures for the two generations indicates the start of a steady decline in the ability to read text of paragraph length, then a great deal of our scientific and cultural heritage is likely to become highly marginalized.

I guess something that we're beginning to learn is that people who have been poor, or who are poor, or who've been poor for a long time, live so close to the edge that things like moral philosophy, poetry, are more easily meaningful to them than they are to people who have less difficult lives.

Sullivan had to confront the two central issues of education: the need for discipline and the need for freedom. Her experience taught her that, unless the pupil is able to submit in some measure to the authority of the teacher, the process of education cannot begin. Yet unless the teacher is able to respond directly to the student's questions and needs, the process will degenerate into rote excercise and boredom.