Zick Rubin famous quotes

Children, then, acquire social skills not so much from adults as from their interactions with one another. They are likely to discover through trial and error which strategies work and which do not, and later to reflect consciously on what they have learned.
-- Zick Rubin

#Children #Errors #Skills

Friends serve central functions for children that parents do not, and they play a critical role in shaping children's social skills and their sense of identity. . . . The difference between a child with close friendships and a child who wants to make friends but is unable to can be the difference between a child who is happy and a child who is distressed in one large area of life.
-- Zick Rubin

#Children #Play #Skills

Belonging to a group can provide the child with a variety of resources that an individual friendship often cannot--a sense of collective participation, experience with organizational roles, and group support in the enterprise of growing up. Groups also pose for the child some of the most acute problems of social life--of inclusion and exclusion, conformity and independence.
-- Zick Rubin

#Children #Growing Up #Support

Whereas children can learn from their interactions with their parents how to get along in one sort of social hierarchy--that of the family--it is from their interactions with peers that they can best learn how to survive among equals in a wide range of social situations.
-- Zick Rubin

#Children #Parent #Peers

Although adults have a role to play in teaching social skills to children, it is often best that they play it unobtrusively. In particular, adults must guard against embarrassing unskilled children by correcting them too publicly and against labeling children as shy in ways that may lead the children to see themselves in just that way.
-- Zick Rubin

#Children #Teaching #Play

When we look at a child, we see that sense of fullness, of intrinsic aliveness, of joy in being, is not the result of something else. There is value in just being oneself, it is not because of something one does or doesn't do. It is there in the beginning, when we are children, but slowly it gets lost.

I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?

Many persons who are not conversant with mathematical studies imagine that because the business of [Babbage’s Analytical Engine] is to give its results in numerical notation, the nature of its processes must consequently be arithmetical and numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and in fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly.

But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. 'Might makes right,' and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.

It is better to be divided by truth than to be united in error. It is better to speak the truth that hurts and then heals, than falsehood that comforts and then kills.

Error sometimes supplies the surprise that makes life interesting.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

There is a dearth of thinking skills - people are taught what to think, not how.

The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.

To engage human energy, human skill, and human talent in the service of peace, for the alternative is unthinkable - war, destruction, and desolation; and to build a world community which will stand as a lasting monument to the millions of men and women, to such devoted and distinguished world citizens and fighters for peace as the late Dag Hammarskjold, who have given their lives that we may live in happiness and peace...