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Noam Chomsky

"Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children['s] ... normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don't understand."

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"Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children['s] ... normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don't understand."

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Amber Hurdle

"They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing."

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Amber Hurdle

"This is what a real teacher does: she opens the gates of our minds to the possibilities of the soul."

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Amber Hurdle

"Frivolity is inborn, conceit acquired by education."

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Amber Hurdle

"Since we cannot know all there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything."

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Amber Hurdle

"If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I'll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming 'Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?"

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Amber Hurdle

"It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written."

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Amber Hurdle

"If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong."

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Amber Hurdle

"Everything has changed. . . except the way we think. The aim [of education] must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of community their highest life problems."

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Amber Hurdle

"My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors."

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Amber Hurdle

"The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret."

Explore more quotes by Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
"If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong."
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Noam Chomsky
"In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country. President Clinton intervened and blocked it."
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Noam Chomsky
"The idea that you have to avoid teaching evolution or pretend you're not teaching it is unique in the industrial world. And the statistics are mind-boggling. Roughly half the population think the world was created a couple thousand years ago."
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Noam Chomsky
"Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice."
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Noam Chomsky
"If workers are more insecure, that's very 'healthy' for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won't ask for wages, they won't go on strike, they won't call for benefits; they'll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that's optimal for corporations' economic health."
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Noam Chomsky
"The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history."
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Noam Chomsky
"Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune."
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Noam Chomsky
"There is oppression that shouldn't exist. There is a struggle for freedom all the time. There are very serious dangers: the species may be heading toward extinction. I can't see how anybody can fail to have an interest in trying to help people become more engaged in thinking about these problems and doing something about them."
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Noam Chomsky
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum-even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
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Noam Chomsky
"Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society."
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