| Real learning is not something
added, it is a reorganization of the system. New nets and assemblies
occur, loops form, alternate pathways develop. The viewed world
is different and so is the viewer.
- Joanna Macy, World
as Lover, World as Self
Be prepared to be surprised.
- Harrison Owen, Open
Space Technology
Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no
longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
- Marc Prensky, Digital
Natives, Digital Immigrants (PDF)
Institutions everywhere, from corporations to the military,
are discovering that maintaining a healthy balance of 'bottoms
up' management (i.e. listening) with the old 'top-down' management
(i.e. demanding) is a far better way to be successful. It is
high time we stop hiding behind our teaching and administration
desks, afraid of our own kids, and learn to dialog with them
about their own learning. After all, isn't that what real education
is all about?
- Marc Prensky, To
educate, we must listen (PDF)
In 1837, Frederick
Froebel started the first school for four and five year
olds in Germany.
He called it 'kindergarten,' or a children's garden, and made
it into a paradisiacal sanctuary where teachers read kids poetry
and stories, led them in singing songs, and oversaw them as
they gardened and played outdoors. Government authorities later
shut the place down, citing the 'dangerous freedom' of the experiment.
- Rob
Brezsny
Awareness by itself is not enough, it must be joined by mastery.
- Piero Ferrucci, what
we may be
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything
new.
- Albert Einstein
The things that can destroy us are politics without principle;
pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge
without character; business without morality; science without
humanity; and worship without sacrifice.
- Gandhi
I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like
what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me -
so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred
to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away
what I had been taught.
- Georgia O'Keeffe
The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis
by using the same thinking that created the situation.
- Albert Einstein
You can't solve a problem on the same level that it was created.
You have to rise above it to the next level.
- Albert Einstein
There is no travel without learning and no learning without
travel.
- Oliver Hillel
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge.
- Charles Darwin
In this great future, you cannot forget your past.
- Bob Marley
When a donkey flies, you don't blame him for not staying up
that long.
- Mary Tyler Moore show
You ain't going to learn what you don't want to know.
- Grateful Dead
Don't let classes get in the way of your education.
- Conversation, 1984
Traditions cannot be frozen in time. They need to be preserved
and brought to a modern sensibility.
- Conversation
Be curious. Don't try for consistency.
- Conversation
As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more
by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
- Robert Bly
One way to be successful is to stop making the same mistakes.
- Conversation
You know, when Pope Urban VIII refused to look through the
telescope of Galileo, it was because he didn't want to admit
the fact that Jupiter had moons. His argument was that if he,
the Pope, who was the top dog at the time, the top tweet in
birdhouse, if he didn't see it, it didn't exist. Remember that
the word 'real' originally meant 'royal.' It still does in Spanish.
If the king didn't see it, it didn't exist. If the court chronicle
didn't record it, it didn't exist.
- Harold Humes, Writing
on Air
Standing on the shoulders of giants, I feel so cold.
- REM
A psychiatrist had been working with an autistic child. For
a long time he had been trying to communicate with him, but
the child had remained locked in his own world. At last, one
day, the psychiatrist took a pencil, threw it on the ground
and told the child: "Now pick it up and give it to me."
His tone carried the weight of all the hopes of the failed attempts
of the past. The atmosphere was ripe; the child did as he was
asked, and in that magic moment a link of consciousness was
established between the two. The psychiatrist later talked about
this experience to a group of colleagues in a conference. Soon
after, many of them started mechanically throwing pencils before
autistic children and waiting for the children to pick them
up. Of course, what had come to be known as "the pencil
technique" failed.
- Piero Ferrucci, what
we may be |