If I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child's natural curiosity and … - Paul Lockhart

Same topic Authors

Quote of the day

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

Paul Lockhart

If I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child's natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn't possibly do as good a job as is currently being done-I simply wouldn't have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.

Children, Crush, Ideas, Jobs, Mechanism, Natural

Same Author Quotes

There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depends heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.

Art, Expression, Long, Mathematics, Psychedelic, Purest

A good problem is something you don't know how to solve. That's what makes it a good puzzle and a good opportunity.

Know, Opportunity, Problem, Solve

Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity-- to pose their own problems, to make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs-- you deny them mathematics itself.

Art, Creatively, Inspiration, Opportunity

To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion − not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don't understand what your creation is up to.

Conjecture, Discovery, Gave, Inspiration, Math

If teaching is reduced to mere data transmission, if there is no sharing or excitement and wonder, if teachers themselves are passive recipients of information and not creators of new ideas, what hope is there for their students?

Data, Excitement, Hope, Teacher, Teachers, Teaching