Education

• “Cut down on television watching and instead spend the time with your family, read, exercise, or do something else that enhances the quality of your life.” Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy, Page 35
• “…coming into work earlier, reading regularly in your field, taking courses to improve your skills, and focusing on high-value tasks in your work will all combine to have an enormous positive impact on your future.” Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy, Page 27
• “Only about 3 percent of adults have clear, written goals. These people accomplish five to ten times as much as people of equal or better education and ability but who, for whatever reason, have never taken the time to write out exactly what they want.” Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy, Page 10
• “No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude, and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God…and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.” (Orson F. Whitney, Ensign, Nov. 1987, 60; Faith Precedes the Miracle, 98
• “President Joseph F. Smith, who declared the three great dangers that “threaten the Church within” are false educational ideas, sexual impurity, and the flattery of prominent men in the world (Gospel Doctrine, 313)” (Men of Influence, 34)
• Money Girl’s Smart Moves to Deal with Your Debt (Laura D. Adams) “Without basic financial education, anyone can create money troubles that are difficult to resolve. When that happens, we run the risk of living in perpetual fear about the state of our finances. That burden can hold us back from living the kind of life we truly want for ourselves and for our families.”
• “I have had commerce and conversation with knowledgeable people of the clergy and the laity, Latins and Greeks, Jews and Moors, and with many others of different religions. Our Lord has favored my occupation and has given me an intelligent mind. He has endowed me with a great talent for seamanship; sufficient ability in astrology, geometry, and arithmetic; and the mental and physical dexterity required to draw spherical maps…with everything in its proper place. During this time I have studied all kinds of texts: cosmography, histories, chronicles, philosophy, and other disciplines. Through these writings, the hand of Our Lord opened my mind to the possibility of sailing to the Indies and gave me the will to attempt the voyage…Who could doubt that this flash of understanding was the work of the Holy Spirit…? The Holy Spirit illuminated his holy and sacred Scripture, encouraging me in a very strong and clear voice…urging me to proceed. Continually, without ceasing a moment, they insisted that I go on.” Columbus, Book of Prophecies, 67 and 69.
• In a letter to his wife from Paris, John Adams observed: “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” Seven Miracles That Saved America, Page 126
• “It keeps me cheerfully humble to think of myself as a beginner in a field in which I’m acclaimed as an expert. I also know, from painful experience, that the moment my attitude of cheerful humility slips into self-righteousness or arrogance, the universe will just as cheerfully step in with an unexpected way to make me humble again. The universe will teach us our lessons with the tickle of a feather or the whomp of a sledgehammer, depending on how open we are to learning the particular lesson. Getting stubborn and defensive invites the sledgehammer; getting open and curious invites the feather. It took me a long time to figure out who was in charge of the painfulness of my lessons.” The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level (Gay Hendricks)- Highlight on Page 195
• “Upgrading your skills is one of the most important personal productivity principles of all.” Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy, Page 63
• “Rule: Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.” Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy, Page 64
• “Everything is learnable. And what others have learned, you can learn as well.” Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy, Page 64
• , 28 and 29 O that cunning plan of the evil one! O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish. 29 But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God. Book Of Mormon,
• , 42 And whoso knocketh, to him will he open; and the wise, and the learned, and they that are rich, who are puffed up because of their learning, and their wisdom, and their riches—yea, they are they whom he despiseth; and save they shall cast these things away, and consider themselves fools before God, and come down in the depths of humility, he will not open unto them. Book Of Mormon,
• “Gather in your resources, rally all your faculties, marshal all your energies, focus all your capacities upon mastery of at least one field of endeavor.” John Haggai. Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy, Page 80
• “A single issue of the daily New York times now contains more information than the seventeenth-century man or woman would have encountered in a lifetime.” Beating the Midas Curse, by Perry L. Cochell and Rodney C. Zeeb, Page 30
• “If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.” Susanne K. Langer. Beating the Midas Curse, by Perry L. Cochell and Rodney C. Zeeb, Page 57
• “What’s even more disheartening is the way our fixation on deficits affects young people in the home and classroom. In every culture we have studied, the overwhelming majority of parents (77% in the United States) think that a student’s lowest grades deserve the most time and attention. Parents and teachers reward excellence with apathy instead of investing more time in the areas where a child has the most potential for greatness.” StrengthsFinder 2.0 (Tom Rath) Kindle Location 193-96
• “I have heard very fearful and even dismal opinions coming from some in your age group regarding the questions that missionary had in mind. I have heard some of you say that you wonder whether there is any purpose in going on a mission or getting an education or planning for a career if the world we live in is going to be so uncertain. I have even heard sweethearts say, “We don’t know whether we should get married in such uncertain times.” Worst of all, I have heard reports of some newlyweds questioning whether they should bring children into a terror-filled world on the brink of latter-day cataclysms. May I tell you that, in a way, those kinds of attitudes worry me more than Al-Qaeda worries me? We must never, in any age or circumstance, let fear and the father of fear (Satan himself) divert us from our faith and faithful living. There have always been questions about the future. Every young person and every young couple in every era has had to walk by faith into what has always been some uncertainty—starting with Adam and Eve in those first tremulous steps out of the Garden of Eden. But that is all right. This is the plan. It will be okay. Just be faithful. God is in charge. He knows your name and He knows your need.” Broken Things to Mend (Jeffrey R. Holland) Kindle Loc. 778-87
• “The mind of man is the crowning creation of God.” (Gordon B. Hinckley, Ensign, May 1986, 48)
• “No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude, and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God…and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.” (Orson F. Whitney, Ensign, Nov. 1987, 60; Faith Precedes the Miracle, 98)
• “The Lord has made no secret of the fact that He intends to try the faith and the patience of His Saints. (.) We, mortals, are so quick to forget the Lord: ‘And thus we see that except the Lord doth chasten his people with many afflictions…they will not remember him (). However, the Lord knows our bearing capacity, both as to coping and to comprehending, and He will not give us more to bear than we can manage at the moment, though to us it may seem otherwise. (;.) Just as no temptations will come to us from which we cannot escape or which we cannot bear, we will not be given more trials than we can sustain. (.)…President Brigham Young said of a geographical destination, ‘This is the place.’ Of God’s plan of salvation, with its developmental destination, it can be said, ‘This is the process’! President Young, who knew something about trial and tribulation but also of man’s high destiny, said that the Lord lets us pass through these experiences that we might become true friends of God. By developing our individual capacities, wisely exercising our agency, and trusting God—including when we feel forsaken and alone—then we can, said President Young, learn to be ‘righteous in the dark.’ (Secretary’s Journal, 28 Jan. 1857.) The gospel glow we see radiating from some—amid dark difficulties—comes from illuminated individuals who are ‘of good cheer’! To be cheerful when others are in despair, to keep the faith when others falter, to be true even when we feel forsaken—all of these are deeply desired outcomes during the deliberate, divine tutorials which God gives to us—because He loves us. (Msh. 3:19.) These learning experiences must not be misread as divine indifference. Instead, such tutorials are a part of the divine unfolding.” (Neal A. Maxwell, Ensign, Nov. 1982, 67)
• “In 2008, the kindergarten curriculum at most North American schools, both public and private, looks very much like the first-grade curriculum of 1978. Nowadays it’s all about learning to read and write.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 16
• “It now appears that the language areas of the brain in many five-year-old boys look like the language areas of the brain of the average three-and-a-half-year-old girl. Have you ever tried to teach a three-and-a-half-year-old girl to read? It’s frustrating, both for the teacher and for the girl. It’s simply not developmentally appropriate, to use the jargon of early childhood educators. You’re asking her to do something that her brain is just not yet ready to do. Trying to teach five-year-old boys to learn to read and write may be just as inappropriate as it would be to try to teach three-year-old girls to read and write. Timing is everything, in education as in many other fields. It’s not enough to teach well. You have to teach well to kids who are ready to learn, kids who are developmentally “ripe” for learning. Asking five-year-old boys to learn to read—when they’d rather be running around or playing games—may be the worst possible introduction to school, at least for some boys.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 18
• “Imagine visiting a twenty-first-century kindergarten—which is to say, a kindergarten where children are expected to do what first-graders were expected to do thirty years ago, a kindergarten where children are expected to sit for hours doing paper-and-pencil exercises. In the typical kindergarten, you will often find that the teacher has divided the children into two groups. Over here, with the teacher, are the kids who are ready to learn to read and write: mostly girls, one or two boys. Over there, on the other side of the room, are the other kids: the kids whom the teacher has (correctly) recognized are not ready to learn to read and write. That group is mostly boys, with one or two girls. There’s one thing five-year-old girls and boys are equally good at: figuring out who’s in Dumb Group. By November, the kids in Dumb Group are aware of their inferior status, and they don’t like it.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 18
• “Professor Deborah Stipek, dean of the school of education at Stanford University, has found that kids form opinions about school early.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 20
• “Critics of American education often point out, quite accurately, that the United States spends more money per pupil than most other developed countries and yet accomplishes less. On the international test most widely administered around the world, the United States ranks at #25, well below countries whose per-pupil spending on education is much lower, such as Hungary (#23), Poland (#21), the Czech Republic (#15) and Finland (#1).7 Finland, incidentally, consistently scores at or near the very top of all of these international rankings. What’s the most distinctive characteristic of public education in Finland? Very simple: Children in Finland don’t begin any formal school until they are seven years old.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 20
• “Nevertheless, by the time they’re teenagers, Finnish children are beating American children by large margins on the same test. In the latest round of testing, for example, the average fifteen-year-old in Finland scored 545 in reading; fifteen-year-old American students taking the same examination scored 490. In problem-solving, the average Finnish teenager scored 547, while the average American teenager scored a dismal 480.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 20
• “Many parents have figured out that the accelerated pace of today’s kindergarten is not a good match for their five-year-old son. Particularly in affluent neighborhoods, it’s become common for parents to enroll their son in kindergarten one year later than the district would normally enroll that child; it’s not unusual to find that half the boys, or more, are enrolled in kindergarten at age six rather than at age five. In low-income neighborhoods—where many working parents simply can’t afford to keep their children home another year—typically fewer than 3 percent of boys will be held back.10 One reason that boys from low-income neighborhoods are doing so much worse in school than boys from more affluent neighborhoods, beginning in early elementary education, maybe that the boys from more affluent neighborhoods are starting school at a later age, on average, than the boys from the poor neighborhoods.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 21
• “It’s easy to see how these sex differences are relevant to education. Girls will do the homework because the teacher asked them to. Boys are more likely to do the homework only if it interests them. If it bores them, or if they think it’s “stupid,” they are more likely to ignore it. Researchers have consistently found that girls are significantly more likely than boys to do the assigned homework,25 in every subject.26 Even the highest-achieving boys are significantly less likely to do the homework than the comparably achieving girls.27 Girls at every age get better grades in school than boys do, in every subject—not because girls are smarter, researchers have found, but because girls try harder.28 Most girls would like to please the teacher, if possible. Most boys don’t care much about pleasing the teacher or about getting straight A’s—and boys who do try to please the teacher and who do care about their grades will lower their status in the eyes of the other boys.29 Girls are more likely to assess their work as their teachers do. Boys are less likely to care what the teacher thinks of their work. That divergence leads to an enduring paradox: at every age, girls do better in school, but are less satisfied with their achievements, compared with the boys.30 In 2006, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania reported that girls’ greater self-discipline and self-control—perhaps deriving from their greater motivation to please the teacher—appears to be a key distinguishing factor that has enabled girls to survive and thrive in the accelerated world of twenty-first-century education.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men(Leonard Sax) Page 26
• “There is more than fifty years of research on the importance, for child development, of multisensory interaction with the real world. This work began with the investigations of the psychiatrist René Spitz into “hospitalism,” the syndrome of stunted emotional and cognitive development that was seen in abandoned children raised in sterile and impersonal hospitals after World War II. This research demonstrated that children must have a rich, interactive sensory environment—touching, smelling, seeing, hearing the real world—in order for the child’s brain and mind to develop properly.32 Without such real-world experiences, the child’s development will be impaired.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)
• “The first thing that happens when you ask kids to do stuff they have no interest in doing is they stop paying attention.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 34
• “The second thing that happens when you ask kids to do stuff they have no interest in doing is they get annoyed. They get irritable. They withdraw.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 35.
• “Boys are less likely to read today simply because they don’t want to. And that change in motivation is, at least in part, a consequence of the gender-blind changes in education over the past thirty years.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 39
• “knowing how”—experiential knowledge, Kenntnis—and has placed too much focus on “knowing that”—didactic knowledge, Wissenschaft.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 62
• “Then Shaffer makes a subtle shift. Most of us don’t live on rural farms anymore, he observes. So what would education “based on life itself . . . look like in our high-tech, digital world?” His answer is that video games can serve the same function for twenty-first-century kids that working on a farm would have done in previous generations.14 Video games are, he asserts, the best training to make kids smarter and better prepared for the challenges they will face in the twenty-first century.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 62
• “A series of studies over the past seven years has demonstrated clearly and unambiguously that the more time your child spends playing video games, the less likely he is to do well in school—whether he is in elementary school, middle school, high school, or college.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 63
• SEE ALSO Learning or Knowledge
• “When these tests were first conducted thirty years ago, there was a substantial gender gap in the results, with boys outperforming girls. When the researchers repeated the tests in 2005, they found that the gender gap had vanished. The gap didn’t disappear because the girls were doing better. These researchers found that girls are not doing better; in fact, the performance of eleven- and twelve-year-old girls in 2005 had deteriorated slightly in comparison with the performance of eleven- and twelve-year-old girls thirty years ago. Instead, they found that the boys’ performance in 2005 was dramatically worse than it had been thirty years ago. “This is a huge and significant statistical change,” concluded Professor Shayer.18 Boys who are nearly twelve years old “are doing [only] as well as the eight- to nine-year-olds in 1976,” he observed.19 Why the drop? Professor Shayer suggested that “the most likely reasons are the lack of experiential play [Kenntnis] in primary schools, and the growth of a video-game, TV culture. Both take away the kind of hands-on play that allows kids to experience how the world works in practice.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 65
• “Professor Shayer’s study isn’t the only one to document a recent decline in the intelligence of boys and young men. Norwegian researchers published an analysis of test scores of Norwegian draftees between the 1950s and 2002. From the 1950s until the mid-1980s, test scores steadily improved, then leveled off, then began to decline in the early 1990s.21 (Norway requires military service of all young men, so a selection bias can’t explain this drop.) Denmark, like Norway, requires a brief stint of military service for all young men. Professor David Owen of Brooklyn College recently collaborated with Danish researchers to look for a similar phenomenon among Danish recruits. Analyzing test scores for more than five hundred thousand recruits between 1959 and 2004, Owen and his Danish counterparts found a gradual rise in performance from 1959 through the 1980s, a plateau into the early 1990s, and a definite decline between about 1994 and 2004.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 65
• ““Education and training are the most important investments in human capital,” writes Gary S. Becker, professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, in his book Human Capital. “These investments improve skills, knowledge…and thereby raise…psychic incomes.”  Wealth in Families Third Edition (Charles W. Collier) Page 33
•  2 Nephi 9: 28…  O that cunning plan of the evil one! O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish.
• 2 Nephi 9: 29…  But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God.
• “In times of change, learners inherit the Earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”  Eric Hoffer
• “Never forget that intelligence rules the world and ignorance carry the burden.  Therefore, remove yourself as far as possible from ignorance and seek as far as possible to be intelligent.”  – Marcus Garvey
• “knowing how”—experiential knowledge, Kenntnis—and has placed too much focus on “knowing that”—didactic knowledge, Wissenschaft.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 62
• “There were twelve and a half years from the time I received my doctoral degree until I sent my first bill for surgical services,” Russell recalled. “We borrowed money. Dantzel earned some. I made a little here and there. Somehow we survived.” Insights from a Prophet’s Life, Russell M. Nelson, Page 25
• “Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” Mandelan