Reading Quotes - page 97
Do your neighbors burn one another alive?” was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.
"Do your shamans walk around on stilts?” Fraa Orolo asked, reading from a leaf that, judging by its brownness, was at least five centuries old. Then he looked up and added helpfully, "You might call them pastors or witch doctors.”
"When a child gets sick, do you pray? Sacrifice to a painted stick? Or blame it on an old lady?”
"Do you fancy you will see your dead dogs and cats in some sort of afterlife?
Neal Stephenson
It was difficult to sustain the illusion that education was of value for kids who would not live long enough to use it. They'd never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. ... Free from the constraints of racking up high test scores or getting into colleges, students could learn for learning's sake-which was how it ought to be. The tick-tock curriculum had dissolved and been replaced by activities improvised from day to day by teachers and parents: hiking in the mountains, doing art projects about the Cloud Ark, talking with psychologists about death, reading favorite books. In one sense Amelia and her colleagues had never been more needed, never had such an opportunity to show their quality.
Neal Stephenson
To avoid this error, the error of assuming that that to be widely read and to be well read are the same thing, we must consider a certain distinction in types of learning. ... In the history of education, men have often distinguished between learning by instruction and learning by discovery. ... Discovery stands to instruction as learning without a teacher stands to learning through the help of one. In both cases the activity of learning goes on in the one who learns. It would be a mistake to suppose that discovery is active learning, and instruction passive. There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading. This is so true, in fact, that a better way to make the distinction clear is to call instruction "aided discovery.”.
Mortimer Adler
Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.
Terry Eagleton
