“
Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.
”
”
Stephen Fry
“
I was hugely impressed... was the ultimate example of a man who knew what he didn't know, was perfectly willing to admit it, and didn't want to leave until he understood. That's heroic to me.
I wish every grad student had that attitude.
”
”
Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)
“
A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either.
”
”
Mortimer J. Adler (How to Read a Book)
“
Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be ‘much not many.
”
”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
“
educators best serve students by helping them be more self-reflective. The only way any of us can improve—as Coach Graham taught me—is if we develop a real ability to assess ourselves. If we can’t accurately do that, how can we tell if we’re getting better or worse?
”
”
Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)
“
Rose," Alberta said, leaning toward me. "I'm going to be blunt with you. I'm not going to give you lectures or demand any explanations. Honestly, since you aren't my student anymore, I don't have the right to ask or tell you anything."
"You can lecture," I told her. "I've always respected you and want to hear what you have to say."
The ghost of a smile flashed on her face. "All right, here it is. You screwed up."
"Wow. You weren't kidding about bluntness."
"The reasons don't matter. You shouldn't have left. You shouldn't have dropped out. Your education and training are too valuable—no matter how much you think you know—and you are too talented to risk throwing away your future."
I almost laughed. "To tell you the truth? I'm not sure what my future is anymore."
"Which is why you need to graduate."
"But I dropped out."
She snorted. "Then drop back in!"
"I—what? How?"
"With paperwork. Just like everything else in the world.
”
”
Richelle Mead (Blood Promise (Vampire Academy, #4))
“
Ah college years, those were the days. Pure freedom ... leaving home for the first time…the parties…”
"What about the tutorials, the lectures, the large building with all the books called the ‘library’?”
“Is that what those were?” Gerry blithely replied.
”
”
E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly (Gadfly Saga, #1))
“
Entirely in accordance with what education is supposed to be. Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars. You sit in each other's rooms and drink coffee - I suppose it would be vodka and Red Bull now - you share enthusiasms, you talk a lot of wank about politics, religion, art and the cosmos and then you go to bed, alone or together according to taste. I mean, how else do you learn anything, how else do you take your mind for a walk?
”
”
Stephen Fry (The Fry Chronicles)
“
Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery—the frontier that drives the economies of the future—would be incalculable. I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before.
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries)
“
It would be better to be deceived a hundred times than to live a life of suspicion.
”
”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
“
minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time—but it takes energy. It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of a few nonwhite people trying out for a play or joining an intramural team. It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room. Which is why when my friends and I found one another at dinner each night, it was with some degree of relief. It’s why we stayed a long time and laughed as much as we could.
”
”
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
“
The great thing about working out at a gym is that if you put in effort, you get very obvious results. The same should be true of college. A professor’s job is to teach students how to see their minds growing in the same way they can see their muscles grow when they look in a mirror.
”
”
Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)
“
One of our professors described a lecture as 'a mystical process by which the notes on the pad of the lecturer pass on to the pad of the student, without passing through the mind of either'.
”
”
John Cleese
“
The question is not "can you wear your father's shoes?". The question is "can you walk in your father's shoes?". It is one thing having a mentor and it is another thing to become like your mentor.
”
”
Israelmore Ayivor
“
We must never forget our teachers, our lecturers and our mentors. In their individual capacities have contributed to our academic, professional and personal development.
”
”
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
“
We would never ask a hearing student to comprehend a lecture in Mandarin if he or she did not have proficiency in the language. Nevertheless, we ask this feat of deaf children everyday.
”
”
Christine Monikowski
“
Far better for a man that he had never been born than that he should degrade a pulpit into a show box to exhibit himself in.
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”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures To My Students)
“
We must never forget our teachers and our lecturers. In their individual capacities have contributed to our academic, professional and personal development.
”
”
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
“
It is the tendency of deep feeling to subdue the manner rather than to render it too energetic.
”
”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
“
Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think. To ask what college is for is to ask what life is for, what society is for—what people are for. Do students ever hear this? What they hear is a constant drumbeat, in the public discourse, that seeks to march them in the opposite direction. When policy makers talk about higher education, from the president all the way down, they talk exclusively in terms of math and science. Journalists and pundits—some of whom were humanities majors and none of whom are nurses or engineers—never tire of lecturing the young about the necessity of thinking prudently when choosing a course of study, the naïveté of wanting to learn things just because you’re curious about them.
”
”
William Deresiewicz (Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life)
“
It is not great talents God blesses so much as likeness to Jesus.
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures To My Students)
“
It is not great talents God blesses so much as likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God.
”
”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
“
Speech is silver, but silence is golden when hearers are inattentive.
”
”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
“
After the lecture, I talked to a student: “You take all those notes—what do you do with them?
”
”
Richard P. Feynman (Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character)
“
She mesmerized lecture halls of students with her drama and passion, with ideas critics called daring and groundbreaking.
”
”
Jandy Nelson (I'll Give You the Sun)
“
Your own opinion of your state is not worth much. Ask the Lord to search you.
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
“
Many preachers are at home among books but quite at sea among men.
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
“
Heart language is logic set on fire.
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
“
It is foolish to be lavish in words and niggardly in truth.
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
“
Throw away the servility of imitation, and rise to the manliness of originality.
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
“
All good work looks perfectly modern: a piece of Greek sculpture, a portrait of Velasquez—they are always modern, always of our time.
”
”
Oscar Wilde (Lecture to Art Students)
“
Something, somewhere, somewhen, must have happened differently...
PETUNIA EVANS married Michael Verres, a Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford.
HARRY JAMES POTTER-EVANS-VERRES grew up in a house filled to the brim with books. He once bit a math teacher who didn't know what a logarithm was. He's read Godel, Escher, Bach and Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases and volume one of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. And despite what everyone who's met him seems to fear, he doesn't want to become the next Dark Lord. He was raised better than that. He wants to discover the laws of magic and become a god.
HERMIONE GRANGER is doing better than him in every class except broomstick riding.
DRACO MALFOY is exactly what you would expect an eleven-year-old boy to be like if Darth Vader were his doting father.
PROFESSOR QUIRRELL is living his lifelong dream of teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts, or as he prefers to call his class, Battle Magic. His students are all wondering what's going to go wrong with the Defense Professor this time.
DUMBLEDORE is either insane, or playing some vastly deeper game which involved setting fire to a chicken.
DEPUTY HEADMISTRESS MINERVA MCGONAGALL needs to go off somewhere private and scream for a while.
Presenting:
HARRY POTTER AND THE METHODS OF RATIONALITY
You ain't guessin' where this one's going.
”
”
Eliezer Yudkowsky (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality)
“
The fact that students passed him by in uniform and he was standing there in torn jeans and faded old concert T-shirt made me smile. The rebel in me could totally relate.
I stopped in front of him. "They're not going to let you stay in school dressed like that. I got a huge lecture for wearing a black shirt the other day."
He glanced my outfit, which didn't really diverge from my normal fashion, and arched an eyebrow. Black cargo pants, white tank, grey zip-up hoodie, with a blade strapped to my thigh and a dagger in my boot.
"What? Pants are black. Shirt is white. Blade stays." I grinned wider. "Because I'm special.
”
”
Kelly Keaton (A Beautiful Evil (Gods & Monsters, #2))
“
His lectures were always well attended, and not just because he imparted so much wisdom and knowledge: he also managed to do it with humour. It had taken Danny some time to realize that the professor enjoyed provoking discussion and argument by offering up outrageous statements to see what reaction he would arouse from his students.
”
”
Jeffrey Archer (A Prisoner of Birth)
“
Why did colleges make their students take examinations, and why did they give grade? What did a grade really mean? When a student "studied" did he do anything more than read and think-- or was there something special which no one in Walden Two would know about? Why did the professors lecture to the students? Were the students never expected to do anything except answer questions? Was it true that students were made to read books they were not interested in?
”
”
B.F. Skinner (Walden Two (Hackett Classics))
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University lectures are an obsolete practice inherited from the Middle Ages when books were scarce. Students should read, not listen. To swallow instruction from a lectern is like sipping through a straw. Lectures pander to the vanity of the lecturer and stimulate conflict between academics.
”
”
Virginia Woolf
“
I tell my students they can procrastinate as long as they follow three rules: 1. No going onto the computer during their procrastination time. It’s just too engrossing. 2. Before procrastinating, identify the easiest homework problem. (No solving is necessary at this point.) 3. Copy the equation or equations that are needed to solve the problem onto a small piece of paper and carry the paper around until they are ready to quit procrastinating and get back to work. “I have found this approach to be helpful because it allows the problem to linger in diffuse mode—students are working on it even while they are procrastinating.” —Elizabeth Ploughman, Lecturer of Physics, Camosun College, Victoria, British Columbia
”
”
Barbara Oakley (A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra))
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A student will find that he is more affected by one book which he has truly mastered than by 20 books which he has merely skimmed.
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
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Nonsense does not improve by being bellowed.
”
”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
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A vigorous temper is not altogether an evil. Men who are as easy as an old shoe are generally of as lttle worth .
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”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
“
Thousands of persons, many of whom never darkened the door of a college, have learned to read books that most of our college graduates fear to tackle. teachers who understand this fact can help a student read the books that educated the Founding Fathers but not by explaining in lectures what the author would have said if he had been as bright as the lecturer.
”
”
Stringfellow Barr
“
Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov, we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Chekhov; fourth, Turgenev. This is rather like grading students' papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Literature)
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A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.
”
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Carlo Rovelli (Seven Brief Lessons on Physics)
“
The last guest lecturer to honor the students with her presence had been Isabelle Lightwood. And the 'lecture' had consisted of a stern and humiliating warning that every female in a ten-mile radius should keep her grubby littler hands off Simon's hot bod.
Fortunately, the tall, dark-haired man who strode to the front of the classroom looked unlikely to have any interest in Simon or his bod.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (The Lost Herondale (Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy, #2))
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If you are disabled, it is probably not your fault, but it is no good blaming the world or expecting it to take pity on you. One has to have a positive attitude and must make the best of the situation that one finds oneself in; if one is physically disabled, one cannot afford to be psychologically disabled as well. In my opinion, one should concentrate on activities in which one's physical disability will not present a serious handicap. I am afraid that Olympic Games for the disabled do not appeal to me, but it is easy for me to say that because I never liked athletics anyway. On the other hand, science is a very good area for disabled people because it goes on mainly in the mind. Of course, most kinds of experimental work are probably ruled out for most such people, but theoretical work is almost ideal. My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field, which is theoretical physics. Indeed, they have helped me in a way by shielding me from lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in. I have managed, however, only because of the large amount of help I have received from my wife, children, colleagues and students. I find that people in general are very ready to help, but you should encourage them to feel that their efforts to aid you are worthwhile by doing as well as you possibly can.
”
”
Stephen Hawking
“
One evening at a remote provincial college through which I happened to be jogging on a protracted lecture tour, I suggested a little quiz—-ten definitions of a reader, and from these ten the students had to choose four definitions that would combine to make a good reader. I have mislaid the list, but as far as I remember the definitions went something like this.
Select four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a good reader:
1. The reader should belong to a book club.
2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.
3. The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.
4. The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.
5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie.
6. The reader should be a budding author.
7. The reader should have imagination.
8. The reader should have memory.
9. The reader should have a dictionary.
10. The reader should have some artistic sense.
The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense–-which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance.
”
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Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Literature)
“
He felt disgruntled and obscurely let down at having paid good money to discover that the vision that had so irradiated his consciousness was a second-hand one. On the other hand, he told himself, probably it was better to hear that a phantom memory had come floating up out of some lecture of his student days than to be informed that he was going out of his mind.
”
”
Robert Silverberg
“
The screams echoing through Janet's class were hard to bear. She was attempting a lecture on the Treaty of Paris while Mrs. Pachenko walked between the rows of desks insisting upon calm, raising a finger to her lips and whispering to individual students to please sit all the way down in their desks. In the back of the of the room, several kids were cheering as one of them, a young man whose shirt bore a flaming skull, stood hunched atop his desk like a motocross biker, sliding it forward in small hops. Students appear enthusiastic and are communicating well together, I wrote on the evaluation form.
”
”
Alissa Nutting (Tampa)
“
Zeal--what is it? How shall I describe it? Possess it, and you will know what it is. Be consumed with love for Christ, and let the flame burn continuously, not flaming up at public meetings and dying out in the routine work of every day.
”
”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Charles Spurgeon: Lectures To My Students, Vol 1-4 (Illustrated))
“
Gvarab was old enough that she often wandered and maundered. Attendance at her lectures was small and uneven. She soon picked out the thin boy with big ears as her one constant auditor. She began to lecture for him. The light, steady, intelligent eyes met hers, steadied her, woke her, she flashed to brilliance, regained the vision lost. She soared, and the other students in the room looked up confused or startled, even scared if they had the wits to be scared. Gvarab saw a much larger universe than most people were capable of seeing, and it made them blink. The light-eyed boy watched her steadily. In his face she saw her joy. What she offered, what she had offered for a whole lifetime, what no one had ever shared with her, he shared. He was her brother, across the gulf of fifty years, and her redemption.
”
”
Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)
“
Rose,” she said, leaning toward me. “I’m going to be blunt with you. I’m not going to give you lectures or demand any explanations. Honestly, since you aren’t my student anymore, I don’t have the right to ask or tell you anything.” It was like what Adrian had said. “You can lecture,” I told her. “I’ve always respected you and want to hear what you have to say.” The ghost of a smile flashed on her face. “All right, here it is. You screwed up.” “Wow. You weren’t kidding about bluntness.
”
”
Richelle Mead (Blood Promise (Vampire Academy, #4))
“
The belief that science proceeds from observation to theory is still so widely and so firmly held that my denial of it is often met with incredulity. I have even been suspected of being insincere- of denying what nobody in his senses would doubt.
But in fact the belief that we can start with pure observation alone, without anything in the nature of a theory is absurd; as may be illustrated by the story of the man who dedicated his life to natural science, wrote down everything he could observe, and bequeathed his priceless collection of observations to the Royal Society to be used as evidence. This story should show us that though beetles may profitably be collected, observations may not.
Twenty-five years ago I tried to bring home the same point to a group of physics students in Vienna by beginning a lecture with the following instructions : 'Take pencil and paper; carefully observe, and write down what you have observed!' They asked, of course, what I wanted them to observe. Clearly the instruction, 'Observe!' is absurd. (It is not even idiomatic, unless the object of the transitive verb can be taken as understood.) Observation is always selective. It needs a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view, a problem. And its description presupposes a descriptive language, with property words; it presupposes similarity and classification, which in their turn presuppose interests, points of view, and problems.
”
”
Karl Popper (Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Routledge Classics))
“
Information can get from a professors lecture notes and into a student's notebook without passing through the mind of either.
”
”
Douglas Wilson (Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life)
“
Most students were either denying the existence of lectures, lazing up in bed, or in the case of the more studious, already up and learning, which to be honest would usually be me.
”
”
Emily Williams (Letters to Eloise)
“
Think it not strange if you should frequently feel yourself to have failed, nor wonder if it should turn out that at such times you have best succeeded. You must not expect to become sufficient as of yourself; no habit or exercise can render you independent of divine assistance;
”
”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Charles Spurgeon: Lectures To My Students, Vol 1-4 (Illustrated))
“
The quality of authors determines the quality of books.
The quality of musicians determines the quality of songs.
The quality of artists determines the quality of paintings.
The quality of architects determines the quality of buildings.
The quality of generals determines the quality of warriors.
The quality of preachers determines the quality of sermons.
The quality of scientists determines the quality of inventions.
The quality of leaders determines the quality of followers.
The quality of scholars determines the quality of lectures.
The quality of teachers determines the quality of students.
The quality of schools determines the quality of graduates.
The quality of graduates determines the quality of nations.
The quality of plants determines the quality of air.
The quality of air determies the quality of animals.
The quality of animals determines the quality of food.
The quality of food determines the quality of the planet.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
If freedom, personal responsibility, self-initiative, honesty, integrity, and concern for others rank high in your system of values, and if they represent characteristics you would like to see in your children, then you will want to be a trustful parent. None of these can be taught by lecturing, coercion, or coaxing. They are acquired or lost through daily life experiences that reinforce or suppress them. You can help your children build these values by living them yourself and applying them in your relationship with your children. Trust promotes trustworthiness. Self-initiative and all of the traits that depend on self-initiative can develop only under conditions of freedom.
”
”
Peter O. Gray (Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life)
“
Tengo's lectures took on uncommon warmth, and the students found themselves swept up in his eloquence. He taught them how to practically and effectively solve mathematical problems while simultaneously presenting a spectacular display of the romance concealed in the questions it posed. Tengo saw admiration in the eyes of several of his female students, and he realized that he was seducing these seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds through mathematics. His eloquence was a kind of intellectual foreplay. Mathematical functions stroked their backs; theorems sent warm breath into their ears.
”
”
Haruki Murakami (1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3))
“
By the time they're in college, it's gone too far. They've had twelve years without disciplined learning and they don't know how to apply themselves. They haven't learned to study or to pace their work so that projects get completed on time. They fall asleep in lectures because they expect to be entertained not educated.
”
”
Lois Duncan (Killing Mr. Griffin)
“
the classroom as a living, breathing place. They chose discussions over lectures, experience over theory. They sent students to the Deep South for civil rights projects and to the inner city for fieldwork. They went
”
”
Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie)
“
Eight-year-old Jimmy comes home from school with a note from his teacher that says, “Jimmy stole a pencil from the student sitting next to him.” Jimmy’s father is furious. He goes to great lengths to lecture Jimmy and let him know how upset and disappointed he is, and he grounds the boy for two weeks. “And just wait until your mother comes home!” he tells the boy ominously. Finally he concludes, “Anyway, Jimmy, if you needed a pencil, why didn’t you just say something? Why didn’t you simply ask? You know very well that I can bring you dozens of pencils from work.
”
”
Dan Ariely (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves)
“
The problems on campus life today are not about free speech. They are about how the students have absolutely nothing to do with their lives but sit and listen to lectures, find the best parties to attend, and otherwise discover first-world problems to stew about and protest. That's the root of the problem. This is not a commercial environment where people are incentivized to find value in each other. Campuses have become completely artificial 4-year holding tanks for infantilized kids with zero experience in actual life in which people find ways to get along. These students are not serving each other in a market exchange, and very few have worked at day in their lives, so their default is to find some offense and protest. It's all they've been taught to do and all they know how to do. Idle hands and parents' money = trouble.
”
”
Jeffrey Tucker
“
Scientists became “moral exhibitionists” in the lecture hall as they demonized fellow scientists and urged their students to evaluate ideas not for their truth but for their consistency with progressive ideals such as racial and gender equality.14
”
”
Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion)
“
You can be an intellectual without a question,
an academic without an answer,
a lecturer without a lesson,
a guru without a disciple,
a master without a student,
a general without an army,
a scholar without a theory,
a scientist without a discovery,
an inventor without an invention,
a warrior without a weapon,
a preacher without a sermon,
a prophet without a prophecy,
a seer without a revelation,
a sorcerer without a spell,
a professor without a message,
a leader without a follower,
a dreamer without a vision,
a healer without a patient,
a ruler without a nation,
a prince without a kingdom,
and a king without a territory.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
The development of the proletarian elite does not take place in an academic setting. Rather, it is brought about by battles in the factories and unions, by disciplinary punishments and some very dirty fights within the parties and outside of them, by jail sentences and illegality. Students do not flock in large numbers there as they do to the lecture halls and laboratories of the bourgeoisie. The career of a revolutionary does not consists of banquets and honarary titles, of interesting research projects and professional salaries; more likely, it will acquaint them with misery, dishonory and jail and, at the end, uncertainty. These conditions are made bearable only by a super-human faith. Understandably, this way of life will not be the choice of those who are nothing more than clever.
”
”
Max Horkheimer
“
In one experiment conducted on five classes of Australian college students, a man was introduced as a visitor from Cambridge University in England. However, his status at Cambridge was represented differently in each of the classes. To one class, he was presented as a student; to a second class, a demonstrator; to another, a lecturer; to yet another, a senior lecturer; to a fifth, a professor. After he left the room, each class was asked to estimate his height. It was found that with each increase in status, the same man grew in perceived height by an average of a half inch, so that as the “professor” he was seen as two and a half inches taller than as the “student.
”
”
Robert B. Cialdini (Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials))
“
Our textbooks were ridiculous propaganda. The first English sentence we learned was "Long live Chairman Mao!" But no one dared to explain the sentence grammatically. In Chinese the term for the optative mood, expressing a wish or desire, means 'something unreal." In 1966 a lecturer at Sichuan University had been beaten up for 'having the audacity to suggest that "Long live Chairman Mao!" was unreal!" One chapter was about a model youth hero who had drowned after jumping into a flood to save an electricity pole because the pole would be used to carry the word of Mao.
With great difficulty, I managed to borrow some English language textbooks published before the Cultural Revolution from lecturers in my department and from Jin-ming, who sent me books from his university by post. These contained extracts from writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde, and stories from European and American history. They were a joy to read, but much of my energy went toward finding them and then trying to keep them.
Whenever someone approached, I would quickly cover the books with a newspaper. This was only partly because of their 'bourgeois' content. It was also important not to appear to be studying too conscientiously, and not to arouse my fellow students' jealousy by reading something far beyond them. Although we were studying English, and were paid par fly for our propaganda value by the government to do this, we must not be seen to be too devoted to our subject: that was considered being 'white and expert." In the mad logic of the day, being good at one's profession ('expert') was automatically equated with being politically unreliable ('white').
”
”
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
“
Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month—the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this—or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation!—why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
”
”
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
“
You will encounter resentful, sneering non-readers who will look at you from their beery, leery eyes, as they might some form of sub-hominid anomaly, bookimus maximus. You will encounter redditters, youtubers, blogspotters, wordpressers, twitterers, and facebookers with wired-open eyes who will shout at from you from their crazy hectoring mouths about the liberal poison of literature. You will encounter the gamers with their twitching fingers who will look upon you as a character to lock crosshairs on and blow to smithereens. You will encounter the stoners and pill-poppers who will ignore you, and ask you if you have read Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, and if you haven’t, will lecture you for two hours on that novel and refuse to acknowledge any other books written by anyone ever. You will encounter the provincial retirees, who have spent a year reading War & Peace, who strike the attitude that completing that novel is a greater achievement than the thousands of books you have read, even though they lost themselves constantly throughout the book and hated the whole experience. You will encounter the self-obsessed students whose radical interpretations of Agnes Grey and The Idiot are the most important utterance anyone anywhere has ever made with their mouths, while ignoring the thousands of novels you have read. You will encounter the parents and siblings who take every literary reference you make back to the several books they enjoyed reading as a child, and then redirect the conversation to what TV shows they have been watching. You will encounter the teachers and lecturers, for whom any text not on their syllabus is a waste of time, and look upon you as a wayward student in need of their salvation. You will encounter the travellers and backpackers who will take pity on you for wasting your life, then tell you about the Paulo Coelho they read while hostelling across Europe en route to their spiritual pilgrimage to New Delhi. You will encounter the hard-working moaners who will tell you they are too busy working for a living to sit and read all day, and when they come home from a hard day’s toil, they don’t want to sit and read pretentious rubbish. You will encounter the voracious readers who loathe competition, and who will challenge you to a literary duel, rather than engage you in friendly conversation about your latest reading. You will encounter the slack intellectuals who will immediately ask you if you have read Finnegans Wake, and when you say you have, will ask if you if you understood every line, and when you say of course not, will make some point that generally alludes to you being a halfwit. Fuck those fuckers.
”
”
M.J. Nicholls (The 1002nd Book to Read Before You Die)
“
Terrorism,” the professor had lectured, “has a singular goal. What is it?” “Killing innocent people?” a student ventured. “Incorrect. Death is only a byproduct of terrorism.” “A show of strength?” “No. A weaker persuasion does not exist.” “To cause terror?” “Concisely put. Quite simply, the goal of terrorism is to create terror and fear. Fear undermines faith in the establishment. It weakens the enemy from within . . . causing unrest in the masses. Write this down. Terrorism is not an expression of rage. Terrorism is a political weapon. Remove a government’s façade of infallibility, and you remove its people’s faith.” Loss
”
”
Dan Brown (Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1))
“
I tried to bunked classes, I skipped lectures, I cheated in exams, I lied to my teachers and some stuff were taken for granted when I was a student before. I am not proud about it. Of course, I learned from that experience. I learned that everyone has a chance to change. It doesn't mean that if I am dumbass before and you call me the same thing now. Because now, I work hard, play the game well and strive for excellence. This is me now, a guy with a strong grit in my heart.
”
”
Nathaniel E. Quimada
“
He will glory against the church, and say, ‘These are your holy preachers: you see what their preciseness is, and whither it will bring them.’ He will glory against Jesus Christ Himself, and say, ‘These are thy champions! I can make thy chiefest servants to abuse thee; I can make the stewards of thy house unfaithful.
”
”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Lectures to My Students)
“
Cast the burden of the present, along with the sin of the past and the fear of the future, upon the Lord, who forsaketh not His saints. Live by the day--ay, by the hour. Put no trust in frames and feelings. Care more for a grain of faith than a ton of excitement. Trust in God alone, and lean not on the needs of human help.
”
”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Charles Spurgeon: Lectures To My Students, Vol 1-4 (Illustrated))
“
The complex tactile movement of writing by hand stimulates our mind more effectively than typing. It activates multiple regions of the brain simultaneously, thereby imprinting what we learn on a deeper level. As a result, we retain information longer than we would by tapping it into an app.18 In one study, college students who were asked to take lecture notes by hand tested better on average than those who had typed out their notes. They were also able to better retain this information long after the exam.
”
”
Ryder Carroll (The Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future)
“
A great anatomist used to close his opening lecture to beginning medical students with words that apply equally to our own undertaking. “In this course,” he would say, “we shall be dealing with flesh and bones and cells and sinews, and there are going to be times when it’s all going to seem terribly cold-blooded. But never forget. It’s alive!” II.
”
”
Huston Smith (The World's Religions, Revised and Updated (Plus))
“
This is about the other side of BDSM,” he continued in the bland tones of a professor reciting a lecture to a group of inane students. “Our relationship is about control and submission. This means if I want to fuck you until it hurts, I will, and you will let me. It also means, if I want to eat the honey between your thighs for hours until you are an incoherent mass of quivering flesh barely able to think past the pleasure, I will. I do not need to hurt you or threaten you to own you. There is dominance in pleasure too.
”
”
Giana Darling (Enthralled (The Enslaved Duet #1))
“
In high schools it seems that half of teachers lecture most or all of the time.* Lectures are not always the best method of learning, and they are not enough to develop students into lifelong learners. If you spend all of your school years being fed information and are never given the opportunity to question it, you won’t develop the tools for rethinking that you need in life.
”
”
Adam M. Grant (Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know)
“
It should be obvious that technologies are capable of replacing teachers and professors in a wide variety of settings. The current buzzword for this is the flipped classroom—students watch lectures and learn the material online at home, then do their homework at school with the help of teachers and teaching assistants. Teachers may no longer need to prepare or deliver lectures, reducing them to what could be called “learning coaches.” The diminished skill set required is sure to transform the profession and create yet more challenges for our already beleaguered teachers.
”
”
Jerry Kaplan (Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth & Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
“
First things first: Always go to class! The importance of this rule cannot be overmphasized. It doesn't matter if your class meets at 6:00 A.M., at the top of the steepest hill on campus, on saturday mornings—wake up, get dressed, and go to the lecture on time. As Lydia, a straight-A student from Dartmouth, explains, if you skip class, "it'll take twice as long studying to make up for what you missed." This is why class attendance is so important. Not because learning is power, or it's what your parents would want you do, but because it saves you time. if you attend class regularly, you will significantly cut down on the amount of studying required to score high grades. Don't make this negotiable. Even if you're tired, hung over, or extremely busy, find a way to make it there.
”
”
Cal Newport (How to Become a Straight-A Student)
“
The Student"
“In America,” began
the lecturer, “everyone must have a
degree. The French do not think that
all can have it, they don’t say everyone
must go to college.” We
incline to feel, here,
that although it may be unnecessary
to know fifteen languages.
one degree is not too much. With us, a
school—like the singing tree of which
the leaves were mouths that sang in concert—
is both a tree of knowledge
and of liberty—
seen in the unanimity of college
mottoes, lux et veritas,
Christo et ecclesiae, sapiet
felici. It may be that we
have not knowledge, just opinions, that we
are undergraduates,
not students; we know
we have been told with smiles, by expatriates
of whom we had asked, “When will
your experiment be finished?” “Science
is never finished.” Secluded
from domestic strife, Jack Bookworm led a
college life, says Goldsmith;
and here also as
in France or Oxford, study is beset with
dangers—with bookworms, mildews,
and complaisancies. But someone in New
England has known enough to say
that the student is patience personified,
a variety
of hero, “patient
of neglect and of reproach,"—who can "hold by
himself.” You can’t beat hens to
make them lay. Wolf’s wool is the best of wool,
but it cannot be sheared, because
the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as
with wolves’ surliness,
the student studies
voluntarily, refusing to be less
than individual. He
“gives him opinion and then rests upon it”;
he renders service when there is
no reward, and is too reclusive for
some things to seem to touch
him; not because he
has no feeling but because he has so much.
”
”
Marianne Moore
“
It was Daisuke's conviction that all morality traced its origins to social realities. He believed there could be no greater confusion of cause and effect than to attempt to conform social reality to a rigidly predetermined notion of morality. Accordingly, he found the ethical education conducted by lecture in Japanese schools utterly meaningless. In the schools, students were either instructed in the old morality or crammed with a morality suited to the average European. For an unfortunate people beset by the fierce appetites of life, this amounted to nothing more than vain, empty talk. When the recipients of this education saw society before their eyes, they would recall those lectures and burst out laughing. Or else they would feel that they had been made fools of. In Daisuke's case it was not just school; he had received the most rigorous and least functional education from his father. Thanks to this, he had at one time experienced acute anguish stemming from contradictions. Daisuke even felt bitter over it.
”
”
Natsume Sōseki (And Then)
“
School is often based not on problem solving, which perforce involves actions and goals, but on learning information, facts, and formulas that one has read about in texts or heard about in lectures. It is not surprising, then, that research has long shown that a student’s doing well in school, in terms of grades and tests, does not correlate with being able to solve problems in the areas in which the student has been taught (e.g., math, civics, physics).
”
”
James Paul Gee (The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning)
“
We ought to preach the gospel, not as our views at all, but as the mind of God--the testimony of Jehovah concerning His own Son, and in reference to salvation for lost men. If we had been entrusted with the making of the gospel, we might have altered it to suit the taste of this modest century, but never having been employed to originate the good news, but merely to repeat it, we dare not stir beyond the record. What we have been taught of God we teach. If we do not do this, we are not fit for our position.
”
”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Charles Spurgeon: Lectures To My Students, Vol 1-4 (Illustrated))
“
During the late 1910s and early ’20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory “Americanization” classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was “I am a good American.” During their graduation ceremony they gathered next to a gigantic wooden pot, which their teachers stirred with ten-foot ladles. The students walked through a door into the pot, wearing traditional costumes from their countries of origin and singing songs in their native languages. A few minutes later, the door in the pot opened, and the students walked out again, wearing suits and ties, waving American flags, and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.
”
”
Anne Fadiman (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures)
“
Illness in this society, physical or mental, they are not abnormalities. They are normal responses to an abnormal culture. This culture is abnormal when it comes to real human needs. And.. it is in the nature of the system to be abnormal, because if we had a society geared to meet human needs.. would we be destroying the Earth through climate change? Would we be putting extra burden on certain minority people? Would we be selling people a lot of goods that they don't need, and, in fact, are harmful for them? Would there be mass industries based on manufacturing, designing and mass-marketing toxic food to people?
So we do all that for the sake of profit. That's insanity. It is not insanity from the point of view of profit, but it is insanity from the point of view of human need. And so, in so many ways this culture denies and even runs against counter to human needs. When you mentioned trauma.. given how important trauma is in human life and what an impact it has.. why have we ignored it for so long? Because that denial of reality is built in into this system. It keeps the system alive. So it is not a mistake, it is a design issue. Not that anybody consciously designed it, but that's just how the system survives.
Now.. the average medical student to THIS DAY (I say the average.. there are exceptions) still doesn't get a single lecture on trauma in 4 years of medical school. They should have a whole course on it, Because I can tell you that trauma is related to addiction, all kinds of mental illness and most physical health conditions as well. And there is a whole lot of science behind that, but they don't study that science. Now that reflects this society's denial of trauma, the medical system simply reflects the needs of the larger society, I should say, the dominant needs of the larger society.
”
”
Gabor Maté
“
Q (Quiller-Couch) was all by himself my college education. I went down to the public library one day when I was seventeen looking for books on the art of writing, and found five books of lectures which Q had delivered to his students of writing at Cambridge.
"Just what I need!" I congratulated myself. I hurried home with the first volume and started reading and got to page 3 and hit a snag:
Q was lecturing to young men educated at Eton and Harrow. He therefore assumed his students − including me − had read Paradise Lost as a matter of course and would understand his analysis of the "Invocation to Light" in Book 9. So I said, "Wait here," and went down to the library and got Paradise Lost and took it home and started reading it and got to page 3, when I hit a snag:
Milton assumed I'd read the Christian version of Isaiah and the New Testament and had learned all about Lucifer and the War in Heaven, and since I'd been reared in Judaism I hadn't. So I said, "Wait here," and borrowed a Christian Bible and read about Lucifer and so forth, and then went back to Milton and read Paradise Lost, and then finally got back to Q, page 3. On page 4 or 5, I discovered that the point of the sentence at the top of the page was in Latin and the long quotation at the bottom of the page was in Greek. So I advertised in the Saturday Review for somebody to teach me Latin and Greek, and went back to Q meanwhile, and discovered he assumed I not only knew all the plays by Shakespeare, and Boswell's Johnson, but also the Second books of Esdras, which is not in the Old Testament and not in the New Testament, it's in the Apocrypha, which is a set of books nobody had ever thought to tell me existed.
So what with one thing and another and an average of three "Wait here's" a week, it took me eleven years to get through Q's five books of lectures.
”
”
Helene Hanff
“
These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, “How can you design for people if you don’t know history and psychology? You can’t. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up.” He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu.
But as a professor who was popular with his students—and who advocated general education—Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory.
”
”
Michael Crichton (The Lost World (Jurassic Park, #2))
“
I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course – I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother’s front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I had married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature.
”
”
Mary Karr (The Liars' Club)
“
He always liked learning. Loved it, really. If he could have spent his whole life sitting in a lecture hall, taking notes, could have drifted from department to department, haunting different studies, soaking up language and history and art, maybe he would have felt full, happy.
That's how he spent the first two years.
And those first two years, he was happy. He had Bea, and Robbie, and all he had to do was learn. Build a foundation. It was the house, the one that he was supposed to build on top of that smooth surface, that was the problem. It was just so... permanent.
Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?
But teaching, teaching might be a way to have what he wanted. Teaching is an extension of learning, a way to be a perpetual student.
”
”
Victoria Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue)
“
Speaking to a foreigner was the dream of every student, and my opportunity came at last. When I got back from my trip down the Yangtze, I learned that my year was being sent in October to a port in the south called Zhanjiang to practice our English with foreign sailors. I was thrilled.
Zhanjiang was about 75 miles from Chengdu, a journey of two days and two nights by rail. It was the southernmost large port in China, and quite near the Vietnamese border.
It felt like a foreign country, with turn-of-the-century colonial-style buildings, pastiche Romanesque arches, rose windows, and large verandas with colorful parasols. The local people spoke Cantonese, which was almost a foreign language. The air smelled of the unfamiliar sea, exotic tropical vegetation, and an altogether bigger world.
But my excitement at being there was constantly doused by frustration. We were accompanied by a political supervisor and three lecturers, who decided that, although we were staying only a mile from the sea, we were not to be allowed anywhere near it. The harbor itself was closed to outsiders, for fear of 'sabotage' or defection. We were told that a student from Guangzhou had managed to stow away once in a cargo steamer, not realizing that the hold would be sealed for weeks, by which time he had perished. We had to restrict our movements to a clearly defined area of a few blocks around our residence.
Regulations like these were part of our daily life, but they never failed to infuriate me. One day I was seized by an absolute compulsion to get out. I faked illness and got permission to go to a hospital in the middle of the city. I wandered the streets desperately trying to spot the sea, without success. The local people were unhelpful: they did not like non-Cantonese speakers, and refused to understand me. We stayed in the port for three weeks, and only once were we allowed, as a special treat, to go to an island to see the ocean.
As the point of being there was to talk to the sailors, we were organized into small groups to take turns working in the two places they were allowed to frequent: the Friendship Store, which sold goods for hard currency, and the Sailors' Club, which had a bar, a restaurant, a billiards room, and a ping-pong room.
There were strict rules about how we could talk to the sailors. We were not allowed to speak to them alone, except for brief exchanges over the counter of the Friendship Store. If we were asked our names and addresses, under no circumstances were we to give our real ones. We all prepared a false name and a nonexistent address. After every conversation, we had to write a detailed report of what had been said which was standard practice for anyone who had contact with foreigners. We were warned over and over again about the importance of observing 'discipline in foreign contacts' (she waifi-lu). Otherwise, we were told, not only would we get into serious trouble, other students would be banned from coming.
”
”
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
“
[Paul Olum] was president of the University of Oregon when he heard of [Richard] Feynman’s death. He realized that the young genius he had met at Princeton had become a part of him, impossible to extricate. “My wife died three years ago, also of cancer,” he said.
... I think about her a lot. I have to admit I have Dick’s books and other things of Dick’s. I have all of the Feynman lectures and other stuff. And there are things that have pictures of Dick on them. The article in Science about the Challenger episode. And also some of the recent books.
I get a terrible feeling every time I look at them. How could someone like Dick Feynman be dead? This great and wonderful mind. This extraordinary feeling for things and ability is in the ground and there’s nothing there anymore.
It’s an awful feeling. And I feel it—— A lot of people have died and I know about it. My parents are both dead and I had a younger brother who is dead. But I have this feeling about just two people. About my wife and about Dick.
I suppose, although this wasn’t quite like childhood, it was graduate students together, and I do have more—— I don’t know, romantic, or something, feelings about Dick, and I have trouble realizing that he’s dead. He was such an extraordinarily special person in the universe.
Gleick, James (2011-02-22). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (p. 145). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
”
”
Jame Gleick quoting Paul Olum
“
Dear Mama,
I hope this letter finds you well. It contains all my love and affection. (It also contains all my questions about how you could ever have loved a man like Professor Miller.)
You asked about where I live. I cannot believe I haven’t mentioned it, but I suppose I’m so used to it now I don’t think of it. The dorms are small and plain, but as a student I don’t need much more. (I cannot afford the dorms. I do not live in them.) The food is dreadful, all heavy meat and sauce. I miss fruit! (I am always hungry; a supper with a strange man was the fullest my stomach has been since I got here.)
As I have mentioned in every letter, my professors are all interesting and I take copious notes during lectures. (If you do not bring up my father, I am certainly not going to offer you information on that louse of a man.) The course work is challenging but I am excelling. (I have to be perfect so they can find no excuse to dock my grades.)
I have delivered Aunt Nani’s package to Jacabo. He was so happy to receive it, and I take tea with him once a week. It is a great comfort to speak Melenese with someone. (I live in the hotel where Jacabo works. He saved me when I realized I could not afford room and board at the school. I work long, hard hours in the evenings to earn a tiny hole of a servant’s room and whatever scraps of food are left over.)
Please give everyone my love and tell them how much I am learning to bring back to the island as a teacher. (I will not fail, and I will use everything I learn here to make Melei better.)
Your affectionate daughter,
Jessamin
”
”
Kiersten White (Illusions of Fate)
“
Things changed after that between me and Mark. I stopped being mortified that people might mistake me for one of his acolytes. I was his Boswell, don’t you know. I interviewed him about his childhood—his father was a psychiarist in Beverly Hills. I cataloged the contents of his van. I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology—in finding a cure—but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. “The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,” Mark told me. “I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and suvivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit—in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.” Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.
”
”
William Finnegan (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life)
“
John's particular talents hadn't gone unnoticed but they weren't his artistic talents. They were his talents for having his fellow students fall about with shocked, uncontrollable laughter at his wicked, disrespectful wit. His ability to disrupt a lecture had to be seen to be believed and John's appearance was even worse than his humour. I think he was the last stronghold of the Teddy Boys - totally aggressive and anti-establishment. My first impression of John, as he slouched reluctantly into the lettering class for the first time, was one of apprehension. I felt that I had nothing in common with this individual and as far as I was concerned I never would. In fact he frightened me to death. The only thing that John and I had in common was that we were both blind as bats without our glasses.
”
”
Cynthia Lennon (A Twist Of Lennon)
“
Years ago I conducted a course in fiction writing at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, and we wanted such distinguished and busy authors as Kathleen Norris, Fannie Hurst, Ida Tarbell, Albert Payson Terhune and Rupert Hughes to come to Brooklyn and give us the benefit of their experiences. So we wrote them, saying we admired their work and were deeply interested in getting their advice and learning the secrets of their success. Each of these letters was signed by about a hundred and fifty students. We said we realized that these authors were busy—too busy to prepare a lecture. So we enclosed a list of questions for them to answer about themselves and their methods of work. They liked that. Who wouldn’t like it? So they left their homes and traveled to Brooklyn to give us a helping hand. By
”
”
Dale Carnegie (How to win friends & influence people)
“
The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students in all cases to behave to him, as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability. It seems to presume perfect wisdom and virtue in the one order, and the greatest weakness and folly in the other. Where the masters, however, really perform their duty, there are no examples, I believe, that the greater part of the students ever neglect theirs. No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given. Force and restraint may, no doubt, be in some degree requisite in order to oblige children, or very young boys, to attend to those parts of education which it is thought necessary for them to acquire during that early period of life; but after twelve or thirteen years of age, provided the master does his duty, force or restraint can scarce ever be necessary to carry on any part of education. Such is the generosity of the greater part of young men, that, so far from being disposed to neglect or despise the instructions of their master, provided he shows some serious intention of being of use to them, they are generally inclined to pardon a great deal of incorrectness in the performance of his duty, and sometimes even to conceal from the public a good deal of gross negligence.
”
”
Adam Smith
“
I received comments on how extraordinary it was that I could keep up speaking for exactly 45 minutes. Indeed, in an age of soundbites lasting some seconds and of quick quotes in the news, all those minutes do seem like an eternity, easy to get lost in. Yet, wait a moment. Television is not the only place where speeches are given. Some hundred thousand teachers teach every day. They all speak 45 minutes, more times a day. They have been doing this for years. Every teacher knows exactly when the time will be over and that by then his speech will need to come to a natural end. It is this tension that determines the success of a lesson. It is a sign of the times that we forget these daily achievements in education. A million students daily attend several ‘live’ lectures and this in secondary education alone. These are high ratings!
”
”
Robbert Dijkgraaf
“
Euclid's Elements has been for nearly twenty-two centuries the encouragement and guide of that scientific thought which is one thing with the progress of man from a worse to a better state. The encouragement; for it contained a body of knowledge that was really known and could be relied on, and that moreover was growing in extent and application. For even at the time this book was written—shortly after the foundation of the Alexandrian Museum—Mathematics was no longer the merely ideal science of the Platonic school, but had started on her career of conquest over the whole world of Phenomena. The guide; for the aim of every scientific student of every subject was to bring his knowledge of that subject into a form as perfect as that which geometry had attained. Far up on the great mountain of Truth, which all the sciences hope to scale, the foremost of that sacred sisterhood was seen, beckoning for the rest to follow her.
”
”
William Kingdon Clifford (Lectures and Essays by the Late William Kingdon Clifford, F.R.S. (Volume 1))
“
I bump into a group of girls congregating around a locker. Jessica, Willow (who is notably the only Willow enrolled in our 397-student class and in our 1,579-student school), and Abby. Miney has labeled them in my notebook, in block letters and underlined with a Sharpie:THE POPULAR BITCHES.
When she first used this designation, Miney had to give me a long lecture about how this wasn’t an oxymoron, how someone could be both popular, which I presumed meant that lots of people liked you, and at the same time also be a bitch, which I presumed would have the opposite outcome. Apparently popularity in the context of high school has a negative correlation with people actually liking you but a high correlation with people wanting to be your friend. After careful consideration, this makes sense, though in my case, I am both an outlier and a great example of the fact that correlation does not imply causation. I am nice to everyone but without any upside: People neither like me nor want to be my friend.
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Julie Buxbaum (What to Say Next)
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The first obstacle [to liberal education] is the learning situation itself. What is the ideal learning situation? It is the more or less continuous contact between a student and his teacher, who is another student, more advanced in many ways, but still learning himself. This situation usually does not prevail; in fact, it is extremely rare. Since the immemorial, institutions of learning, especially higher learning, have been established, called „schools“ — and the ambiguity of the term becomes immediately apparent. Institutionalization means ordering activities into certain patters; in the case of learning activities, into classes, schedules, courses, curriculums, examinations, degress, and all the venerable and sometimes ridiculous paraphernalia of academic life. The point is that such institutionalization cannot be avoided: both the gregarious and the rational character of man compel him to impose upon himself laws and regulations. Moreover, the discipline of learning itself seems to require an orderly and planned procedure. And yet we all know how this schedule routine can interfere with the spontaneity of questioning and of leaning and the occurrence of genuine wonderment. A student may even never become aware that there is the possibility of spontaneous learning which depends merely on himself and on nobody and nothing else. Once the institutional character of learning tends to prevail, the goal of liberal education may be completely lost sight of, whatever other goals may be successfully reached. And I repeat, this obstacle is not extraneous to learning. It is prefigured in the methodical and systematic character of exploratory questioning. It has to be faced over and over again.
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Jacob Klein (Lectures and Essays)