Learning

"LEARNING, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious."

"What is the real object of modern education? Is it to cultivate and develop the mind in the right direction; to teach the disinherited and hapless people to carry with fortitude the burden of life (allotted them by Karma); to strengthen their will; to inculcate in them the love of one’s neighbor and the feeling of mutual interdependence and brotherhood; and thus to train and form the character for practical life? Not a bit of it. And yet, these are undeniably the objects of all true education. No one denies it; all your educationalists admit it, and talk very big indeed on the subject. But what is the practical result of their action? Every young man and boy, nay, every one of the younger generation of schoolmasters will answer: “The object of modern education is to pass examinations,” a system not to develop right emulation, but to generate and breed jealousy, envy, hatred almost, in young people for one another, and thus train them for a life of ferocious selfishness and struggle for honors and emoluments instead of kindly feeling."

"Children should above all be taught self-reliance, love for all men, altruism, mutual charity, and more than anything else, to think and reason for themselves. We would reduce the purely mechanical work of the memory to an absolute minimum, and devote the time to the development and training of the inner senses, faculties and latent capacities. We would endeavour to deal with each child as a unit, and to educate it so as to produce the most harmonious and equal unfoldment of its powers, in order that its special aptitudes should find their full natural development. We should aim at creating free men and women, free intellectually, free morally, unprejudiced in all respects, and above all things, unselfish."

"I... refer to the... Waynflete Lectures given by... E. D. Adrian, on The Physical Background of Perception because the results of physiological investigations seem... in perfect agreement with my suggestion about the meaning of reality in physics. The messages which the brain receives have not the least similarity with the stimuli. They consist in pulses of given intensities and frequencies, characteristic for the transmitting nerve-fiber, which ends in a definite place in the cortex. All the brain 'learns' (I use... the objectionable language of the 'disquieting figure of a little hobgoblin sitting... aloft in the ') is a distribution or a 'map' of pulses. From this information it produces the image of the world by a process which can metaphorically be called a consummate place of combinatorial mathematics: it sorts out of the maze of indifferent and varying signals invariant shapes and relations which form the world of ordinary experience."

"Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude."

"Having a global education and being a world citizen is the key element for peace and for all elements of progress outlined in the UN Charter. Indeed, that is the foundation for the necessary new skill-set at the conference table. Being able to look at the problems through the eyes of others reduces fears and misunderstandings that breed conflict and confusion. We must learn to work together; we must learn more about each other; and we must come to the table with resolve to solve those problems no single country can address... Through global education, we must prepare world citizens who understand the interconnected nature of our planet and who are willing to act on behalf of people everywhere. We each must spend more time learning about other cultures and other lands."

"Justice weighs out learning to those who suffer."

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."