Quotes & Sayings About Learning Theory

All films are learning processes. I am still trying to work out how you make a movie. I didn't study at film school or any of those things. I didn't bother with film theory. — Terry Gilliam

The central hypothesis of the theory is that language acquisition occurs in only one way: by understanding messages. — Stephen D. Krashen

There is a mathematical underpinning that you must first acquire, mastery of each mathematical subdiscipline leading you to the threshold of the next. In turn you must learn arithmetic, Euclidian geometry, high school algebra, differential and integral calculus, ordinary and partial differential equations, vector calculus, certain special functions of mathematical physics, matrix algebra, and group theory. For most physics students, this might occupy them from, say, third grade to early graduate school - roughly 15 years. Such a course of study does not actually involve learning any quantum mechanics, but merely establishing the mathematical framework required to approach it deeply. — Carl Sagan

His [Thomas Edison] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle. — Nikola Tesla

Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been ... It goes beyond academic degrees, specialized training or book learning, because all the theory in the world means nothing if you can't read the street. — David Simon

Learning" virtue - becoming virtuous - is more like practicing scales on the piano than learning music theory: the goal is, in a sense, for your fingers to learn the scales so they can then play "naturally," as it were. Learning here isn't just information acquisition; it's more like inscribing something into the very fiber of your being. Thus — James K.A. Smith

It's like learning to fall properly. If you can manage not to tighten up you won't hurt yourself as much. The same theory applies to your day, physically and emotionally. The tensions simply can't take hold. — Diane Von Furstenberg

One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy. I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Young's theory that "as soon as we have found the key of life it opes the gates of death." Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one! — George Eliot

I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s. — Lionel Hampton

One important idea is that science is a means whereby learning is achieved, not by mere theoretical speculation on the one hand, nor by the undirected accumulation of practical facts on the other, but rather by a motivated iteration between theory and practice. — George E.P. Box

I think when you're learning an instrument, you are restricted because much of it is the noise of individual theory and your ability to play the instrument. — James Blake

DevOps and its resulting technical, architectural, and cultural practices represent a convergence of many philosophical and management movements (including): Lean, Theory of Constraints, Toyota production system, resilience engineering, learning organizations, safety culture, Human factors, high-trust management cultures, servant leadership, organizational change management, and Agile methods. — Gene Kim

I really detest those people who like to draw practical conclusions from scholarly truths, who 'apply learning to real life', like engineers who turn to propositions of chemistry into insecticides for bedbugs. It translates, in Goethe's words, as: 'life is grey, but the golden tree of theory is always green'. — Antal Szerb

Economic growth springs not chiefly from incentives - carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments for workers and entrepreneurs. The incentive theory of capitalism allows its critics to depict it as an inhumane scheme of clever manipulation of human needs and hungers scarcely superior to the more benign forms of slavery. Wealth actually springs from the expansion of information and learning, profits and creativity that enhance the human qualities of its beneficiaries as it enriches them. Workers' learning increasingly compensates for their labor, which imparts knowledge as it extracts work. Joining knowledge and power, capitalism focuses on the entropy of human minds and the benefits of freedom. Thus it is the most humane of all economic systems. — George Gilder

the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory. If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like 'force,' 'mass,' 'space,' and 'time,' he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution. That — Thomas S. Kuhn

The [engineer] should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning, for it is by his judgement that all work done by the other arts is put to test. This knowledge is the child of practice and theory. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

Non-fiction is to theory as fiction is to experience. — Joyce Rachelle

The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of science education underlying this project. From constructivist theories of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product. — Seymour Papert

... experimental failure, the disproving of a theory, was as important to the advancement of learning as a success would be. — Daniel Keyes

Which meant I spent my spare time learning theory, studying dead languages and reading books like Essays on The Metaphysical by John "never saw a polysyllabic word he didn't like" Cartwright. — Ben Aaronovitch

When I was in film school, I was learning more theory than practice. — Louis Leterrier

It is a mistake to think of these men as visionary dreamers, playing around at Philadelphia with abstract conceptions of political theory, pulling a whole scheme of government out of the air like a rabbit out of a hat. True, many of them had read and studied enough about the science of politics to put the average statesman of today to shame. But political science was to them an extremely practical topic of discussion, dealing with the extremely practical business of running a government
not, as today, a branch of higher learning reserved for the use of graduate students. — Fred Rodell

My work on prime gaps lead to lots of media coverage, some good, some bad, some ugly, and some merely ridiculous. For example, a reporter of our university newspaper, who admitted that he is still learning English, wrote that "Prof. Goldston solved one of the most controversial problems in the prime number theory last month with support from his Turkish partner." — Daniel Goldston

I was part of your train but my railroad car was disconnected and
switched at the track, and now my friends and I are on a separate journey
learning how not to rock the lifeboat, sending out a patient S.O.S to you for
help. I reach out with love, possibly one of a dying breed, the old survival of the fittest theory, or perhaps I am throwing you a lifeline from my Rectangular Bubble. — Ann Lloyd

Psychology cannot tell people how they ought to live their lives. It can however, provide them with the means for effecting personal and social change. — Albert Bandura

Then, too, I am constantly confronted by students, some of whom have already rejected all ways but the scientific to come to know the world, and who seek only a deeper, more dogmatic indoctrination in that faith (although the world is no longer in their vocabulary). Other students suspect that not even the entire collection of machines and instruments at MIT can significantly give meaning to their lives. They sense the presence of a dilemma in an education polarized around science and technology, an education that implicitly claims to open a privileges access-path to fact, but that cannot tell them how to decide what to count as fact. Even while they recognize the genuine importance of learning their craft, they rebel at working on projects that appear to address themselves neither to answering interesting questions of fact nor to solving problems in theory. — Joseph Weizenbaum

The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is universally applicable. We should regard it not as a dogma, but as a guide to action. Studying it is not merely a matter of learning terms and phrases but of learning Marxism-Leninism as the science of revolution. It is not just a matter of understanding the general laws derived by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin from their extensive study of real life and revolutionary experience, but of studying their standpoint and method in examining and solving problems. — Mao Zedong

Psychology should be the chief basic science upon which the practices of education depend. It should have supplied education with the information it needs concerning the processes of understanding, learning, and thinking, among other things. One of the difficulties has been that such theory as has been developed has been based primarily upon studies of behavior of rats and pigeons. As someone has said, some of the theory thus developed has been an insult even to the rat. — J. P. Guilford

Experience by itself teaches nothing ... Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning. — W. Edwards Deming

It's not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it's what you have to UNlearn. — Isaac Asimov

Few people realize that the Bible discourages people from studying foreign languages. They story of the tower of Babel informs us that there is one humanity (God's one), only that "our languages are confused." That has always meant that, say, any German philosopher could know exactly what the Chinese people were thinking, only that he couldn't understand them. So instead of learning the foreign language, he demanded a translation. — Thorsten J. Pattberg

Pedagogy of the Oppressed resonated with progressive educators, already committed to a 'child-centered' rather than a 'teacher-directed' approach to classroom instruction. Freire's rejection of teaching content knowledge seemed to buttress what was already the ed schools' most popular theory of learning, which argued that students should work collaboratively in constructing their own knowledge and that the teacher should be a 'guide on the side,' not a 'sage on the stage.' — Sol Stern

All tradition,' said the Professor, 'is a type of spiritual truth. The superstitions of the East, and the mythologies of the North - the beautiful Fables of old Greece, and the bold investigations of modern science - all tend to elucidate the same principles; all take their root in those promptings and questionings which are innate in the brain and heart of man. Plato believed that the soul was immortal, and born frequently; that it knew all things; and that what we call learning is but the effort which it makes to recall the wisdom of the Past. "For to search and to learn," said the poet-philosopher, "is reminiscence all." At the bottom of every religious theory, however wild and savage, lies a perception - dim perhaps, and distorted, but still a perception - of God and immortality. — Amelia B. Edwards

One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: 'This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?' I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves.
I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religion, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford ... I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

But is the commercial theory of learning true? Daniel Anderson says that new research suggests that children actually don't like commercials as much as we thought they did because commercials don't tell stories, and stories have a particular salience and importance to young people. — Malcolm Gladwell

I have a theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves. — Seymour Hersh

The clerk is looking at me. His expression hasn't changed. What I want to do is punch a hole in the front of the desk, reach through, grab his balls, and make him sing The Mickey Mouse Club song. But these days, I'm working on the theory that killing everyone I don't like might be counterproductive. I'm learning to use my indoor voice like a big boy, so I smile back at the clerk. — Richard Kadrey

The myth that if you don't start early, you might as well not start, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The music-making world that young people confront reminds me a lot of the world of school sports. After a lot of weeding out, in the end you've got a varsity with a few performers and an awful lot of people on the sidelines thinking, "Gee, it's too bad I wasn't good enough." We need to be careful about that. There seems to be an unspoken idea, in instruction of the young, that the people who start the fastest will go the farthest. But that's not only an unproven theory; it's not even a tested theory. The assumption that the steeper the learning curve, the higher it will go, is also unfounded. If we did things a little differently, we might find out that people whose learning curves were much slower might later on go up just as high or higher. — John Holt

I am, by nature, a guitar player ... I learned all of these other instruments around that, and around the theory that I built learning the guitar. — Hunter Hayes

Those, who are strongly wedded to what I shall call 'the classical theory', will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new. It is for others to determine if either of these or the third alternative is right. — John Maynard Keynes

of oppressive state power. Gramsci's theory of hegemony as a form of cultural pedagogy is also invaluable as an element of critical educational thought. By emphasizing the pedagogical force of culture, Gramsci expands the sphere of the political by pointing to those diverse spaces and spheres in which cultural practices are deployed, lived, and mobilized in the service of knowledge, power and authority. For Gramsci, learning and politics were inextricably related and took place not merely in schools but in a vast array of public sites. — Henry A. Giroux

The logic of all this seems to be that it is all right for young people in a democracy to learn about any civilization or social theory that is not dangerous, but that they should remain entirely ignorant of any civilization or social theory that might be dangerous on the ground that what you don't know can't hurt you ... a complete denial of the democratic principle that the general diffusion of knowledge and learning through the community is essential to the preservation of free government. — Carl L. Becker

Latin is a dead tongue
And Romans made songs!
Then no one disagree:
It delighted them in theory
Now it's "the Latin" in me. — Ana Claudia Antunes

The important question is whether [a theory] is true, not whether envisioning an alternative is too intellectually painful to bear. — J. D. Trout

I think actually if you take the analogy with other areas of engineering, and increasingly of science and even mathematics, you can see people do not have to learn the vast number of formulae they used to learn. Instead, they have to learn to use the computer effectively. This frees them, I feel, to understand concepts and the foundations while they're learning the mechanics of the application of the theory. — C.A.R. Hoare

The overwhelming number of teachers ... are unable to name or describe a theory of learning that underlies what they do. — Alfie Kohn

Form is what transforms the content of a work into its essence. Do you understand? The character of music arises out of its form like steam from water,' Yury Andreevich said. 'With solid understanding of the general laws of form, which encompass all that is amenable to formulation, one can, by groping further, perceive the individual, the particular. Then, subtracting the general, one can sense a residue where wonder lurks in its purest, most undiluted form. Herein lies the goal of theory: the more fully one grasps what is available for comprehension, the more intensely the ineffable shines. — Lyudmila Ulitskaya

Winfree came from a family in which no one had gone to college. He got started, he would say, by not having proper education. His father, rising from the bottom of the life insurance business to the level of vice president, moved family almost yearly up and down the East Coast, and Winfree attended than a dozen schools before finishing high school. He developed a feeling that the interesting things in the world had to do with biology and mathematics and a companion feeling that no standard combination of the two subjects did justice to what was interesting. So he decided not to take a standard approach. He took a five-year course in engineering physics at Cornell University, learning applied mathematics and a full range of hands-on laboratory styles. Prepared to be hired into military-industrial complex, he got a doctorate in biology, striving to combine experiment with theory in new ways. — James Gleick

I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us. — Dale J. Stephens

I have a theory that too much learning unbalances the mind. — Iain Pears

In the absence of either a widely accepted theory of language learning or a solid empirical base for classroom practice, teachers and learners have always been, and will always be, vulnerable to drastic pendulum swings of fashion, the coming and going of various unconventional and unlamented "Wonder Methods" being an obvious recent example. The sad truth is that after at least 2,000 years, most language teaching takes place on a wing and a prayer - sometimes successfully, but often a relative failure. — Michael H. Long

An exceedingly confident student would in theory make a terrible student. Why would he take school seriously when he feels that he can outwit his teachers? — Criss Jami

My achievements in the field of chess are the result of immense hard work in studying theory ... — Alexander Kotov

More about the selection theory: Jerne meant that the Socratic idea of learning was a fitting analogy for 'the logical basis of the selective theories of antibody formation': Can the truth (the capability to synthesize an antibody) be learned? If so, it must be assumed not to pre-exist; to be learned, it must be acquired. We are thus confronted with the difficulty to which Socrates calls attention in Meno [ ... ] namely, that it makes as little sense to search for what one does not know as to search for what one knows; what one knows, one cannot search for, since one knows it already, and what one does not know, one cannot search for, since one does not even know what to search for. Socrates resolves this difficulty by postulating that learning is nothing but recollection. The truth (the capability to synthesize an antibody) cannot be brought in, but was already inherent. — Niels Kaj Jerne

I received comments on how extraordinary it was that I could keep up speaking for exactly 45 minutes. Indeed, in an age of soundbites lasting some seconds and of quick quotes in the news, all those minutes do seem like an eternity, easy to get lost in. Yet, wait a moment. Television is not the only place where speeches are given. Some hundred thousand teachers teach every day. They all speak 45 minutes, more times a day. They have been doing this for years. Every teacher knows exactly when the time will be over and that by then his speech will need to come to a natural end. It is this tension that determines the success of a lesson. It is a sign of the times that we forget these daily achievements in education. A million students daily attend several 'live' lectures and this in secondary education alone. These are high ratings! — Robbert Dijkgraaf

There are different people who got me into music, but what I liked about Beethoven is that even when I didn't understand it or it was too long, there's still something about it that drove me to it. Then it got me excited about actually learning music, like a theory of it. — Albert Hammond Jr.

I really had no religious upbringing, which is unusual. But I think it saved me, because when I found the theory that I wanted to follow, I did not have anything to unlearn. — Louise Hay

Continual Learning Educate yourself. Read books and learn from others who have done it before. Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience. Learn by surrounding yourself with talented players. Just because you win a hand doesn't mean you're good and you don't have more learning to do. You might have just gotten lucky. Don't be afraid to ask for advice. — Tony Hsieh

The pattern recognition theory of mind that I articulate in this book is based on a different fundamental unit: not the neuron itself, but rather an assembly of neurons, which I estimate to number around a hundred. The wiring and synaptic strengths within each unit are relatively stable and determined genetically - that is the organization within each pattern recognition module is determined by genetic design. Learning takes place in the creation of connections between these units, not within them, and probably in the synaptic strengths of the interunit connections. — Ray Kurzweil

When I stand on stage, I get nervous, and because unexpected situations can occur, we need even more preparation. I must have confidence on top of that as well. The reason why I chose drama/theatre as my major is to act after learning all the theory first. You only live once, and I can only live as myself. I think I could learn a lot of things if I can live as others through acting. — Seohyun

Before going back to college, i knew i didn't want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together. — Assata Shakur

I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. Hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression: I was told that if something is unpleasant it's probably feminine. This encouraged me, but the theory was blown by such masculine nouns as murder, toothache, and rollerblade. I have no problem learning the words themselves, it's the sexes that trip me up and refuse to stick. — David Sedaris

My diary entries during this period constantly refer to the importance of learning how to take criticism. If you shut yourself in your own little world, that will be the death of your theory. On the other hand, many of the criticisms you receive are pointless and simply reflect the view that anything new is bad. In such a delicate situation it is crucial to tread gingerly and be careful to appreciate the difference between pertinent and idiotic comments. — Joao Magueijo

He remembered learning in one of his social studies classes
that in the Old West, when Native Americans were thrown into jail, they sometimes dropped dead.
The theory was that someone so used to the freedom of space couldn't handle the confinement, but
Peter had another interpretation. When the only company you had was yourself, and when you
didn't want to socialize, there was only one way to leave the room. — Jodi Picoult

As regards authority I so proceed. Boetius says in the second prologue to his Arithmetic, 'If an inquirer lacks the four parts of mathematics, he has very little ability to discover truth.' And again, 'Without this theory no one can have a correct insight into truth.' And he says also, 'I warn the man who spurns these paths of knowledge that he cannot philosophize correctly.' And Again, 'It is clear that whosoever passes these by, has lost the knowledge of all learning.' — Roger Bacon

I am a patriot. I have always sought to serve my country, in theory a Republic. Learning that secrecy was evil rather than good was my first step. From there it was a steady march toward open-source everything. Now I see all the evil that secrecy enables in a corrupt Congress, a corrupt Executive, a corrupt economy, and a corrupt society. I see that the greatest service I or any other person can render to the Republic is to march firmly, non-violently, toward open-source everything. — Robert David Steele