How Children Learn

For a long time I have been interested in my own thoughts, feelings, and motives, eager to know as much as I can of the truth about myself. After many years, I think that at most I may know something about a very small part of what goes on in my own head. How preposterous to imagine that I can know what goes on in someone else's.

The person who really needs to know something does not need to be told many times, drilled, tested. Once is enough.

But the greatest difference between children and adults is that most of the children to whom I offer a turn on the cello accept it, while most adults, particularly if they have never played any other instrument, refuse it.

We think in terms of getting a skill first, and then finding useful and interesting things to do with it. The sensible way, the best way, is to start with something worth doing, and then, moved by a strong desire to do it, get whatever skills are needed.

If we try to make children fantasize, these fake fantasies, like the ready-made fantasies of TV, will in time drive out most of their true fantasies, the ones that come from their experience in the world and their need to make sense of it and become at home in it.

Words are not only a clumsy and ambiguous means of communication, they are extraordinarily slow.

The only thing to do was to turn off the questions and watch - like a child. Take it all in. See everything, worry about nothing.

There is more real learning in a good picture than in twenty workbooks.

How much people can learn at any moment depends on how they feel at that moment about the task and their ability to do the task.

Children. Nothing could be more simple—or more difficult. Difficult, because to trust children we must trust ourselves—and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. And so we go on treating children as we ourselves were treated, calling this “reality,” or saying bitterly, “If I could put up with it, they can too.

look at children, patiently, repeatedly, respectfully, and to hold off making theories and judgments about them until they have in their minds what most of them do not now have—a reasonably accurate model of what children are like.

Children use fantasy not to get out of, but to get into, the real world.

If he didn't know what it was "supposed" to do, he wasn't going to try to make it do anything; it might do the wrong thing, and someone might think it was his fault.

With the bike right before them, they could not see how it was put together, or if they could, could not hold that knowledge in mind long enough to transfer it to paper. It seemed as if their schooling had been for so long so far removed from reality that they were no longer able to see reality, to grasp it, to come to grips with it.

Do they use the method because they are bright, or is it the use of the method that makes them bright?

Why do they do this? Because it gives them a license to act like tyrants and to feel like saints. “Do what I tell you!” roars the tyrant. “It’s for your own good, and one day you’ll be grateful,” says the saint. Few people, feeling themselves powerless in a world turned upside down, can or even wish to resist the temptation to play this benevolent despot.