Suzuki Method Quotes

That’s why I liked the Suzuki method of teaching piano. There are seven books, and everybody has to start with Book One. Each book includes ten to fifteen songs, and you have to go in order. Kids who practice hard get assigned new songs each week, whereas kids who don’t practice get stuck on the same song for weeks, even months, and sometimes just quit because they’re bored out of their minds.

Man is the Child of his Environment

Suzuki method or no Suzuki method, what matters most of all is the teacher,

Trees for which there is no commercial value are referred to as "weeds" that interfere with commercial harvesting. That's what alders were called until a method to make high-grade paper from them was developed, but you'd never know that alders play an important ecological role. They are the first trees to grow after an opening is cleared in a forest, and they fix nitrogen from the air to fertilize the soil for the later-growing, longer-lived, bigger tree species. Yew trees have tough wood with gnarled branches and were called weeds and burned until a powerful anti-cancer agent was found in their bark.

Are you going to be eternally chained by your own laws of thought, or are you going to be perfectly free in an assertion of life which knows no beginning or end? [...]. The Zen method of discipline generally consists in putting one in a dilemma, out of which one must contrive to escape, not through logic indeed, but through a mind of higher order.

The guiding philosophy of the Suzuki method is that children should learn music as if it were a language, and that they should begin lessons as early as possible, ideally at the age of two and no later than five. Research by Oliver Sacks and others has confirmed this claim. After a certain age—somewhere between eight and twelve years old—the window for learning a spoken or musical language with native-level proficiency slams shut.

The major contradiction in Suzuki's position, one of which he was acutely aware, is that he negated in actual practice what he advocated in theory, namely, that Zen "is a direct method, for it refuses to resort to verbal explanation or logical analysis, or to ritualism" (Ibid. 3:318).

In the traditional descriptions of the progress of meditation, beginning practice always involves coming to terms with the unwanted, unexplored, and disturbing aspects of our being. Although we try any number of supposedly therapeutic maneuvers, say the ancient Buddhist psychological texts, there is but one method of successfully working with such material—by wisely seeing it. As Suzuki Roshi, the first Zen master of the San Francisco Zen Center, put it in a talk entitled “Mind Weeds”: We say, “Pulling out the weeds we give nourishment to the plant.” We pull the weeds and bury them near the plant to give it nourishment. So even though you have some difficulty in your practice, even though you have some waves while you are sitting, those waves themselves will help you. So you should not be bothered by your mind. You should rather be grateful for the weeds, because eventually they will enrich your practice. If you have some experience of how the weeds in your mind change into mental nourishment, your practice will make remarkable progress. You will feel the progress. You will feel how they change into self-nourishment. . . . This is how we practice Zen.11

old, my mother took us to a production of Hair, a mirage of music, revolution, and raw penis; we gave it a standing ovation. By third grade, I wrote screenplays, confessionals, and fan letters to reporters at the New York Times. I played Suzuki-method violin and picked up the bassoon because it was so awkward and oafish that I felt bad for it. I acted and danced,