Quotes About Learning, Creativity, and Education Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced. Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time. If you want to build a boat, do not drum up people to collect wood or assign them tasks or work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom. Creativity is seeing what everyone sees and thinking what no one has ever thought. Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths. The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. Those who apply themselves too closely to little things often become incapable of great things. For the most part I do the thing which my own nature drives me to do. It is shameful to earn so much respect and love for it. Arrows of hate have been shot at me, too; but they never hit me; because somehow they belong to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever. I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity. Grownups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. Teaching does not have to happen for learning to occur. The world is my classroom and life is my teacher. Teachers open the door, you enter by yourself. An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties. Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed... Convince me that you have a seed there and I am prepared to expect wonders. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. They say that 90 percent of TV is junk. But 90 percent of everything is junk. Against every great and noble endeavor stand a million mediocre minds. There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another. The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. |
The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.
Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off...