“Therefore, if we are effective, the distribution of grades will be anything but a normal curve. In fact, a normal curve is evidence of our failure to teach.”

…a student attains ‘higher order thinking’ when he no longer believes in right or wrong”. “A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher´s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student’s fixed beliefs. …

The normal curve is a distribution most appropriate to chance and random activity. Education is a purposeful activity and we seek to have students learn what we would teach.

A large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child’s thoughts, attitudes, and feelings.

What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.

While what is superstition, fad, and myth can be recognized as such and used only when there is nothing else to support us in our frustration and despair.

Creativity follows mastery, so mastery of skills is the first priority for young talent.

We need to be much clearer about what we do and do not know so that we don’t continually confuse the two. If I could have one wish for education, it would be the systematic ordering of our basic knowledge in such a way that what is known and true can be acted on.

After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.

Today, … anything you can come up with that works is worth trying.

When I write, that takes over and I can’t do anything else.

I don’t think there’s anything that I would call essentially Brazilian in João Gilberto Noll work. In that regard, it translates very well to a cosmopolitan audience.

We need to block out the outside world; we need to disbelieve anything that would doubt us, because everyone will doubt us if we allow them that space.

Of course, what’s not universal is talent. Are you making anything that anyone really should see?

But what you realise after you’ve been in the business for a while is that people develop opinions about you that don’t have anything to do with your music, they like or dislike you for a million reasons, they like or dislike you for your last record.

I don’t have anything against my mom, but my family has no emotional connection to each other.

I’m not afraid of anything that might happen to me on this earth, because I know no matter what, nothing can take my spirit from me.