Rote learning

Learning without thought is labor lost.

— Rote learning

The Lord said: … These people draw near with their mouths and honor me with the lips while their hearts are far from me, and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote.

— Rote learning

Nothing taught by force stays in the soul.

— Rote learning

We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding empty.

— Rote learning

Learned we may be with another man’s learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.

— Rote learning

There is frequently more to be learn'd from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men, who talk in a road, according to the notions they have borrowed, and the prejudices of their education.

— Rote learning

A learned coxcomb dyeth his mistakes in so much a deeper colour: a wrong kind of learning serveth only to embroider his errors.

— Rote learning

It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.

— Rote learning

What a pity it is that ... tutors, both in public and private seminaries of learning, should forget that the forming the manners is more necessary to a finished education than furnishing the minds of youth.

— Rote learning

The bookful blockhead ignorantly read,

— Rote learning

The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we believe that we can dispense with learning it.

— Rote learning

The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and kind, martyr and executioner, must fasten the images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

— Rote learning

Frequently, when a person is most convinced that he has understood himself, he is assaulted by the uneasy feeling that he has really only learned someone else’s life by rote.

— Rote learning

For to occupy every spare moment in reading, and to do nothing but read, is even more paralysing to the mind than constant manual labour, which at least allows those engaged in it to follow their own thoughts.

— Rote learning

Truth that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another’s flesh; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thinking of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. This is the fundamental difference between the thinker and the mere man of learning.

— Rote learning

The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age.

— Rote learning

The United States ... celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

— Rote learning

I took the right road to life by conquering it with every step instead of taking possession of it as a tradition for which the young mind has no use. Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging the gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making children to everything that constitutes the surprise of life.

— Rote learning

To cultivate the memory we should confide to it only what we understand and love: the rest is a useless burden; for simply to know by rote is not to know at all.

— Rote learning

What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.

— Rote learning