“The biggest enemy to learning is the talking teacher.”

“It is not the teacher's proper task to be constantly testingand checking the understanding of the learner. That's the learner's task, andonly the learner can do it. The teacher's job is to answer questions whenlearners ask them, or to try to help learners understand better when they askfor that help.”

“Of all I saw and learned this past half year, one thing stands out. What goeson in the class is not what teachers think-- certainly not what I had alwaysthought. For years now I have worked with a picture in mind of what myclass was like. This reality, which I felt I knew, was partly physical, partlymental or spiritual. In other words, I thought I knew, in general, what thestudents were doing, and also what they were thinking and feeling. I see nowthat my picture of reality was almost wholly false. Why didn’t I see thisbefore?”

“schools assume that children are not interested in learning and are not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with it's approrpriate 'morsel' and 'shock.' And when this method doesn't work, the schools assume there is something wrong with the children -- something they must try to diagnose and treat.”

“We learn to do something by doing it.There is no other way.”

“To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid.”

“We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions -- if they have any -- and helping them explore the things they are most interested in.”