Philosophical and Psychological Foundations of Education

QUOTATIONS BY TOPIC

The Importance of Making
Connections

The art of remembering is the art of thinking . . . When we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil’s, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and retain it as to connect it with something else already there. The connecting is the thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall. ~ William James, Talks to Teachers

The minds of geniuses are full of copious and original associations. ~ William James, Talks to Teachers

When a person learns, it is not just a matter of "making connections" but is also a matter of making the structures that then get connected--which means that we need to find some ways to represent not only those external events, but also the relevant mental events. . . . No theory of learning can be complete unless it includes ideas about how we make these "credit assignments." ~ Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine, p. 49

Hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing. ~ T. S. Eliot, in reference to Dante's Inferno

He held the old; he holds the new; I had the habit of tacking together the old and the new, which he did not use to exercise. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Intellect"

While the last century witnessed a new demand for specialized research, prizing the expert's vertical mastery of a single field, the emerging global reality calls for new specialists who can synthesize a diversity of fields and draw quick connections among them. ~ Lee Bollinger, "Why Diversity Matters," The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2007

When things resemble each other, perhaps in very subtle ways and noticed only by the rare poet or scientist, the thought of one will arouse the idea of another. ~ William James

When you combine these two aptitudes—metaphor and compositionality—the language of thought can be pressed into service to conceive and express a ceaseless geyser of ideas. People can discover new metaphors in their efforts to understand something, and can combine them to form still newer and more complex metaphors and analogies. ~ Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, p. 437

Education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements into empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations. ~ Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, p. 439

What is the hardest task in the world? To think. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Intellect"

Ideas go
through most
heads without

picking up

any substance
or leaving
any trace.

~ A. R. Ammons

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Intellectuals who memorize everything, reading for hours on end, slaves to the text, fearful of taking a risk, speaking as if they were reciting from memory, fail to make any concrete connections between what they have read and what is happening in the world, the country, or the local community. They repeat what has been read with precision but rarely teach anything of personal value. ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom

All individuals, at some point in their lives, suffer attacks of cognitive (belief?) dissonance, where incompatible beliefs are suddenly thrust on them and they must behave in a manner consistent with only one of these beliefs. It is at this point that connections are discovered or created and the centrality of a belief comes to prominence. ~ Frank Pajares, Teachers’ Beliefs and Educational Research

Greater or less aptitude in the comparison of ideas and the discovery of relations in what makes the difference in mental capacity of different people. In sensation, judgment is purely passive—we feel what we feel: in perception or idea, it is active—it connects, compares, determines relations. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile

At first sight, it might seem as if, in the fluidity of these successive waves, everything is indeterminate. But inspection shows that each wave has a constitution which can be to some degree explained by the constitution of the waves just passed away. And this relation of the wave to its predecessors is expressed by the two fundamental ‘laws of association.’ ~ William James, Talks to Teachers

Begin with the line of [a student’s] native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these. . . . Schools in which these methods preponderate are schools where discipline is easy, and where the voice of the master claiming order and attention in threatening tones need never be heard. ~ William James, Talks to Teachers

The kind of reading that I have been describing here—the individual quest for what truth a work reveals—is fit for virtually all significant forms of creation. We can seek vital options in any number of places. They may be found for this or that individual in painting, in music, in sculpture, in the arts of furniture making or gardening. Thoreau felt he could derive a substantial wisdom by tending his bean field. ~ Mark Edmundson, Why Read?, p. 111

When the geography and English and history and arithmetic simultaneously make cross-references to one another, you get an interesting set of processes all along the line. ~ William James, Talks to Teachers

Good reductionism (also called hierarchical reductionism) consists not of replacing one field of knowledge with another but of connecting or unifying them. ~ Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, Chapter 4

What is the payoff of connecting the social and cultural levels of analysis to the psychological and biological ones? It is the thrill of discoveries that could never be made within the boundaries of a single discipline, such as universals of beauty, the logic of language, and the components of the moral sense. ~ Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, Chapter 4

The best type of teaching bears in mind the desirability of affecting this interconnection. It puts the student in the habitual attitude of finding points of contact and mutual bearings. ~ John Dewey, Democracy and Education

Ranging beyond a single interest also seems to be a good sign in prospective teachers. . . . The scholar needs range. ~ Kenneth Eble, The Craft of Teaching

Such a wide realization, which coincides with the foundations of a widespread democracy, as well as with the flourishing of novels, holds that there are multiple ways of apprehending experience, and multiple modes of internal organization, or disorder. ~ Mark Edmundson, Why Read?, p. 113

Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. ~ Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach

Humanism is the belief that it is possible for some of us, and maybe more than some, to use secular writing as the preeminent means for shaping our lives. That means that we might construct ourselves from novels, poems, and plays, as well as from works of history and philosophy, in the way that our ancestors constructed themselves (and were constructed) by the Bible and other sacred texts. ~ Mark Edmundson, Why Read?, p. 86

Nature shows all things formed and bound. The intellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness between remote things, and reduces all things into a few principles. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Intellect"

The truth and grandeur of their thought is proved by its scope and applicability, for it commands the entire schedule and inventory of things for its illustration. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Intellect"

In our fragmented age, we particularly need to foster the modes of inquiry that seek bridges among ideas. The search for connections - for the relationships among the parts and the whole - is the driving force that advances knowledge. As we grow in understanding we see deeper into things, and that depth is not separation, but connectedness. Educated intuitions and a creative sense of connections are key skills that our graduates will require. We should, therefore, expect from those who pass through our colleges and universities the ability to search out and understand the principles that underlie what they learn. ~ Thomas Ehrlich

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things." ~ Steve Jobs

The young man who has drunk for the first time from that spring is as happy as if he had found a treasure of wisdom; he is positively enraptured. He will pick up any discourse, draw all its ideas together to make them into one, then take them apart and pull them to pieces. ~ Plato, Philebus

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Last updated:
February 6, 2009 3:37 PM