Guy Claxton > Quotes

“In a complicated, fast-changing world the intelligent path is to let go of being a Knower and embrace being a Learner.”
― Guy Claxton, What's the Point of School?: Rediscovering the Heart of Education

“If we want young people to develop the habits of thinking for themselves, using their imagination, being open to new ideas, saying when they don’t understand, and exploring real challenges together, then they have to see their teachers doing the same thing.”
― Guy Claxton, What's the Point of School?: Rediscovering the Heart of Education

“Children’s success in life depends not on whether they can read, but on whether they do”
― Guy Claxton, What's the Point of School?: Rediscovering the Heart of Education

“the difference between constantly feeling you have to prove yourself, and feeling free to improve yourself.”
― Guy Claxton, What's the Point of School?: Rediscovering the Heart of Education

“As we have seen, the modern mind has a distorted image of itself that leads it to neglect some of its own most valuable learning capacities. We now know that the brain is built to linger as well as to rush, and that slow knowing sometimes leads to better answers. We know that knowledge makes itself known through sensations, images, feelings and inklings, as well as through clear, conscious thoughts. Experiments tell us that just interacting with complex situations without trying to figure them out can deliver a quality of understanding that defies reason and articulation. Other studies have shown that confusion may be a vital precursor to the discovery of a good idea. To be able to meet the uncertain challenges of the contemporary world, we need to heed the message of this research, and to expand our repertoire of ways of learning and knowing to reclaim the full gamut of cognitive possibilities.”
― Guy Claxton, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less

“If real-world, useful knowledge is a provisional, human construction, why on earth do we lead children to believe otherwise? Why do we keep acting as if studying knowledge for its own sake, in a lacklustre, reverential kind of way, is an important thing to do, without feeling the need to explain what such study is equipping them to do (other than pass exams)? Why do schools trundle on, teaching past participles and the Vikings, as if oblivious to the fact that their students are going to graduate into a knowledge-making world, not a knowledge-applying one? Why do we not revel in showing them all the skills, doubts, conversations and controversies that are the stuff of knowledge-making – and help them get better at doing these knowledge-making things for themselves?”
― Guy Claxton, What's the Point of School?: Rediscovering the Heart of Education

“It is the kind of learning you are practising that is important, not the subject-matter you are practising on.”
― Guy Claxton, What's the Point of School?: Rediscovering the Heart of Education

“To flourish in this turbulent and tricky world, a strong, agile, curious mind is an essential.”
― Guy Claxton, Powering Up Children: The Learning Power Approach to Primary Teaching

“Everything is gestation and bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life. Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap, and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. Rainer Maria Rilke”
― Guy Claxton, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less

“Broad, diffuse attention is precisely what is needed in non-routine, ill-defined or impoverished situations, where data is patchy, conventional solutions don’t work, and incidental details may make all the difference. And that is why too much effort inhibits creativity.”
― Guy Claxton, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less

“But the culture that a teacher creates acts like a magnetic field that attracts, stimulates, and rewards certain habits of mind and not others.”
― Guy Claxton, The Learning Power Approach: Teaching Learners to Teach Themselves

“Damasio has shown that, without emotion and intuition, reason easily becomes detached from practical intelligence, and produces intellectually clever people who behave stupidly. From a functional point of view, emotions are general states of readiness to deal with broad kinds of threats and dilemmas. Fear is readiness to flee; anger is readiness to intimidate; sadness is readiness to withdraw and mourn; and ‘interest’ and ‘intrigue’ are the feelings that signal readiness to learn. Without some kind of emotional engagement, learning is slow and weak.”
― Guy Claxton, What's the Point of School?: Rediscovering the Heart of Education

“Martin Hughes found that four-year-olds were perfectly happy to tell you that ‘two plus three’ equal ‘five’, and were even quite willing to say that ‘two wuggles and three wuggles’ make ‘five wuggles’, without having a clue what a wuggle was. But they refused to add ‘two thousands and three thousands’ because, they said, ‘we haven’t done thousands yet’. By four years of age they had already learned that maths was a very special and precarious world where you had to tread carefully, and had to wait to be ‘taught’ before you could move.99”
― Guy Claxton, What's the Point of School?: Rediscovering the Heart of Education