Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 158

Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.
Steven Pinker
High school will probably be better. I mean, some kids will still be jerks, but it's not so bad if you have at least one good friend. Someone who gets you.
Robin Stevenson
They were untouched by modern education, but their government was striving with might and main to procure this inestimable benefit for them; anticlericalism and American bustle would soon free them from belief in miracles and holy likenesses.
Robertson Davies
If you could arrange to avoid that routine job-world, you were an intellectual or an artist. Too restless, tremorous, agitated, too mad to sit at a desk eight hours a day, you needed an institution - a higher institution.
Saul Bellow
The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter, for example, would give high priority to economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics in any high school or college curriculum. Unfortunately, most curricula have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable because no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant to learn a foreign language, or English literature, or trigonometry, or the classics. But no matter how valuable a subject may be, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a world whose complexities are constantly challenging our intuitions, these trade-offs cannot responsibly be avoided.
Steven Pinker
Also, even if technocrats provide reasonable estimates of a risk, which itself is an iffy enterprise, they cannot dictate what level of risk people ought to accept. People might object to a nuclear power plant that has a minuscule risk of a meltdown not because they overestimate the risk, but because they feel that the cost of a catastrophe, no matter how remote, are too dreadful. And of course any of these trade-offs may be unacceptable if people perceive that the benefits would go to the wealthy and powerful while they themselves absorb the risks. Nonetheless, understanding the difference between our best science and our ancient ways of thinking can only make our individual and collective decisions better informed. It can help scientists and journalists explain a new technology in the face of the most common misunderstandings. And it can help all of us understand the technology so that we can accept or reject it on grounds that we can justify to ourselves and to others.
Steven Pinker
Though his public teaching lasted only three years, it has been scrutinized by scholars in every science—among them theology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology to name a few. Jesus’ influence has founded universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. Now spanning the entire globe, Jesus’ followers have been inspired throughout the centuries to set up educational institutions to teach what he taught.
Jon Morrison
...I always took the rearmost seat in the classroom - it gave me a good view of things. And I must confess, the location taught me more about human nature and justice than could be learned from the professors' lectures.
Rohinton Mistry
Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations.
Steven Pinker
True. The school admin decided that a girls clothes were more important than her education.
Svetlana Chmakova
Schoolmastering kept me busy by day and part of each night. I was an assistant housemaster, with a fine big room under the eaves of the main building, and a wretched kennel of a bedroom, and rights in a bathroom used by two or three other resident masters. I taught all day, but my wooden leg mercifully spared me from the nuisance of having to supervise sports after school. There were exercises to mark every night, but I soon gained a professional attitude towards these woeful explorations of the caves of ignorance and did not let them depress me. I liked the company of most of my colleagues, who were about equally divided among good men who were good teachers, awful men who were awful teachers, and the grotesques and misfits who drift into teaching and are so often the most educative influences a boy meets in school. If a boy can't have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to cope with; don't just give him a bad, dull teacher. This is where the private schools score over state-run schools; they can accommodate a few cultured madmen on the staff without having to offer explanations.
Robertson Davies
To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.
Wendy Priesnitz
Let failure be your workshop. See it for what is is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition. (from Workbook)
Steven Heighton
In 1971, after seven years in college, with that magic piece of paper clutched triumphantly in my fist, the best job I was able to get was night watchman on a sewer project in Babylon, N.Y. guarding a hole in the ground to prevent anyone from stealing it. God bless the American educational system!
Spider Robinson
Ask yourself: 'Do I feel the need to laminate?' Then teaching is for you.
Gordon Korman
Every mountain top is within reach if you just keep climbing.
Barry Finlay
The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it
Lawrence M. Krauss
Educate a boy, and you educate an individual. Educate a girl, and you educate a community.
Adelaide Hoodless
Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
Margaret Atwood
The price of success is the risk of self-esteem.
Jim Ruta
Hard world is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.
Malcolm Gladwell
Successes are like milestones while excellence is a never-ending journey.
Majid Kazmi
The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any ‘naturals,’ musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any ‘grinds,’ people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. The idea that excellence at a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of excellence. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.
Malcolm Gladwell
I hope that in victory we are more grateful than proud.
David Brooks
Thankfully failure was a better teacher than success
Toni Anderson
Do not judge my success by the destination I reached but the distance I traveled.
Majid Kazmi
Take the easy road and at the end, you will feel you have achieved nothing. Try the difficult shit and you’ll enjoy your successes.
Michael R. Fletcher
The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations.
Wade Davis
The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievements in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.
Malcolm Gladwell
Being sick successfully is not included in society’s panoply of worthy goals.
Kaimana Wolff
Successful people play the part of being successful consistently in all that they do.
Lorii Myers
Actually, I'm an overnight success. But it took twenty years.
Monty Hall
Success works as a cycle - growth and contraction, balancing and unbalancing - all while you're encountering hurdles that get higher and higher over time.
Julien Smith
Getting lost is not fatal. Almost every time, it will make your world.
Julien Smith
You have had many successes, and you have earned the right to be respected.
Lorii Myers
The futility of action does not absolve one from the failure to act. -
Janette Turner Hospital
The essence of a successful business is really quite simple. It is your ability to offer a product or service that people will pay for at a price sufficiently above your costs, ideally three or four or five times your cost, thereby giving you a profit that enables you to buy and to offer more products and services.
Brian Tracy
Success and failure are two edges of the same blade, two sides of the same coin. To fear one is to forever deny the possibility of the other.
Michelle Sagara West
No one can take the shot for you.
Lorii Myers
When the awareness of what is achievable brushes your life, your journey has begun.
Lorii Myers
No man can be a failure if he thinks he's a success; If he thinks he is a winner, then he is.
Robert W. Service
Forget about style worry about results.
Bobby Orr
The power behind taking responsibility for your actions lies in putting an end to negative thought patterns. You no longer dwell on what went wrong or focus on whom you are going to blame. You don't waste time building roadblocks to your success. Instead, you are set free and can now focus on succeeding.
Lorii Myers
Once you figure out what you want in life—expect nothing less.
Lorii Myers
There are no environments where you're only going to win, because life just isn't like that.
Bobby Orr
Early success is a terrible teacher. You're essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can't do it. You don't know how.
Chris Hadfield
You have to be uncomfortable in order to be successful, in some ways. If you stay in your comfort zone! You would never do the things that you need to do.
Lights Poxlietner
The problem for a lot of people is that they don't really know what they want. They have vague desire: to 'do something creative' or to earn more money or 'to be free', but they can't really pin down what it is precisely that they want. So they drift from one thing to another, enjoying some moments and hating others, but never really finding fulfillment or success. (..)This is why it's hard to lead a successful life (whatever that means to you) when you don't know what you want.
John C. Parkin
Sometimes not getting what you want is a brilliant stroke of luck.
Lorii Myers
I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes.
Jean Vanier
Curiosity is the great motivator of an education. It’s the how of learning: how we go from not knowing something to knowing it inside and out.
Zander Sherman
To know yourself, you must first sacrifice the illusion that already you do.
Vironika Tugaleva
. . and so it is that A Sensei may impart his knowledge of the martial Way and nurture your fighting abilities, but you must learn the wisdom of finding other ways than martial skills to solve your problems
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
For the most part, people strenuously resist any redefinition of morality, because it shakes them to the very core of their being to think that in pursuing virtue they may have been feeding vice, or in fighting vice they may have in fact been fighting virtue.
Stefan Molyneux
Anything that just adds information you can't use is plain dangerous. Anyway, there's too much of everything of this kind, that's come home to me, too much history and culture to keep track of, too many details, too much news, too much example, too much influence, too many guys who tell you to be as they are, and all this hugeness, abundance, turbulence, Niagara Falls torrent. Which who is supposed to interpret? Me? I haven't got that much head to master it all. I get carried away. It doesn't give my feelings enough of a chance if I have to store up and become like an encyclopedia. Why, just as a question of time spent in getting prepared for life, look! a man could spent forty, fifty, sixty years like that inside the walls of his own being. And all high conversation would take place within those walls. And all achievement would stay within those walls. And all glamour too. And even hate, monstrousness, enviousness, murder, would be inside them. This would be only a terrible, hideous dream about existing. It's better to dig ditches and hit other guys with your shovel than die in the walls.
Saul Bellow
Despite these afternoon misgivings and self-reproaches I clung to my notion, ill-defined though it was, that a serious study of human knowledge, or theory, or belief, if undertaken with a critical but not a cruel mind, would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man.
Robertson Davies
There is no sobornost without crucifixion, because it is through pain that one acquires that deep knowledge that has nothing to do with books and education… that deep knowledge that is given by God and by God alone that builds the foundation of unity. People thus united are transparent, and it is in those depths that one finds, I repeat, the foundation of sobornost… of unity.
Catherine de Hueck Doherty
If we had less people who don't know what they are talking about acting like they know what they are talking about, then that's one step closer to making the world a better place.
Ryan Letourneau
Who controls the words controls your thoughts.
Heather Marsh
Those who do not continuously seek knowledge are content to settle for mediocrity.
Keith Allan Moore