In case it is not obvious, whilst many of these quotations are consistent with Taking Children Seriously, many of them are not. Sometimes it is just interesting that that person said it, or it is interesting for some other reason.
“The scrutinising eye of criticism, in looking over our table of contents, will […] observe that there are no chapters on courage and chastity. To pretend to teach courage to Britons, would be as ridiculous as it is unnecessary.”
– Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, 1798, Practical Education, Volume 1, Preface, p. viii
“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to take food continuously even when not hungry, especially if the food handed out under such coercion were to be selected accordingly.”
– Albert Einstein, 1979, Autobiographical Notes, p. 17
“[N]o path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.”
– Albert Einstein, quoted in The Sunday Times 18th July, 1976
“[O]ne had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect [upon me] that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.”
– Albert Einstein, quoted in Paul Arthur Schilpp, 1959, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, p. 17
“We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.”
– R. W. Emerson, 1844, The New England Reformers
“Love is granting another the space to be the way they are and the way they aren’t so they can change if they want to and they don’t have to.”
– Werner Erhard
“Some day, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered, and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right, is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness.”
– Erik Erikson, 1962, Young Man Luther: A study in psychoanalysis and history, Chapter III: Obedience—to whom?, p. 70
Return to alphabetical index of Quotations pages
Taking Children Seriously, ‘Quotations E’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/quotations/