“School is at its best when it gives students the expectation that they will not only dream big, but dream dreams that they can work on every day until they accomplish them – not because they were chosen by a black-box process but because they worked hard enough to reach them.”
Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?
“The two pillars of a future-proof education: Teach kids how to lead; help them learn how to solve interesting problems.”
Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?
“If there’s information that can be written down, widespread digital access now means that just about anyone can look it up. We don’t need a human being standing next to us to lecture us on how to find the square root of a number or sharpen an ax. (Worth stopping for a second and reconsidering the revolutionary nature of that last sentence.) What we do need is someone to persuade us that we want to learn those things, and someone to push us or encourage us or create a space where we want to learn to do them better. If all the teacher is going to do is read her pre-written notes from a PowerPoint slide to a lecture hall of thirty or three hundred, perhaps she should stay home. Not only is this a horrible disrespect to the student, it’s a complete waste of the heart and soul of the talented teacher. Teaching is no longer about delivering facts that are unavailable in any other format.”
Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?
“We can teach people to desire lifelong learning, to express themselves, and to innovate. And just as important, it’s vital we acknowledge that we can unteach bravery and creativity and initiative. And that we have been doing just that. School has become an industrialized system, working on a huge scale, that has significant by-products, including the destruction of many of the attitudes and emotions we’d like to build our culture around.”
Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?
“As soon as we associate reading a book with taking a test, we’ve missed the point.” ~ Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?
“You have been hypnotized or conditioned by an educational processing-system arranged in grades or steps, supposedly leading to some ultimate Success. First nursery school or kindergarten, then the grades or forms of elementary school, preparing you for the great moment of secondary school! But then more steps, up and up to the coveted goal of the university. Here, if you are clever, you can stay on indefinitely by getting into graduate school and becoming a permanent student. Otherwise, you are headed step by step for the great Outside World of family-raising, business, and profession. Yet graduation day is a very temporary fulfillment, for with your first sales-promotion meeting you are back in the same old system, being urged to make that quota (and if you do, they’ll give you a higher quota) and so progress up the ladder to sales manager, vice-president, and, at last, president of your own show (about forty or forty-five years old). In the meantime, the insurance and investment people have been interesting you in plans for Retirement – that really the ultimate goal of being able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of all your labors. but when that day comes, your anxieties and exertions will have left you with a weak heart, false teeth, prostate trouble, sexual impotence, fuzzy eyesight, and a vile digestion.” ~ Alan Watts, The Book
“In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet, if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk.”
Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad