Цитаты из книги Learning All The Time

We are fooling ourselves if we think that by being nice about it we can prevent corrections from sounding like reproofs. Its is only in exceptional circumstances and with the greatest tact that you can correct an adult without to some degree hurting his or her feelings. How can we suppose that children, whose sense of identity or ego or self-esteem is so much weaker, can accept correction equably? I would say that in 99% any child will take correction as a kind of reproof, and this no matter how enthusiastic, pleasant, relaxed, or stimulating we may happen to be.

Anytime that, without being invited, being asked, we try to teach somebody else something, anytime we do that, we convey to that person, whether we know it or not, a double message. 

The first part of the message is: I am teaching you something important, but you are not smart enough to see how important it is. Unless i teach it to you, you'd probably never bother to find it out. 

The second message that uninvited teaching conveys to the person is: what I am teaching you is so difficult that, if I didn't teach it to you, you couldn't learn it. 

The problem is that we human being like teaching. We are a teaching animal, as well as a learning animal. We have to restrain that impulse, that habit, that need to explain things to everybody... unless we are asked. 

Once in an early elementary classroom, I needed something in my desk, and asked a child if he would get it for me. He said OK and asked where it was. I said, "In the top right-hand drawer." There was a pause. Then he said. "Whose right hand, mine or the desk's?" For a second, I was baffled. What on earth could he mean? Then I saw and understood. When he looked at the desk it was as if he saw a living creature facing him. So I said. "Your right hand." Off he went, brought back what I had asked for, and that was that. Later it occurred to me that many young children must be animists, and see objects as if they were living creatures I wondered how many of them might have had that same question in their minds, without ever getting arond to asking it.