Clergyman's

There are two subcategories of holist called irredundant holists and redundant holists. Students of both types image an entire system of facts or principles. Though an irredundant holist’s image is rightly interconnected, it contains only relevant and essential constitents. In contrast, redundant holists entertain images that contain logically irrelevant or overspecific material, commonly derived from data used to ""enrich"" the curriculum, and these students embed the salient facts and principles in a network of redundant items. Though logically irrelevant, the items in question are of great psychological importance to a ""redundant holist"", since he uses them to access, retain and manipulate whatever he was originally required to learn.
- Gordon Pask

Conversation Theory is a summarization of our assumptions and rationale from this early period. Conversations are behaviors, but special kinds of behaviors with hard-valued observables in the form of concept sharings, detected as ""understandings."" Conversations are, we believe, the first basic data of psychological, social, or educational theory. We see later that people can even have conversations with themselves. Conversations which may lead to concept sharing need not be verbal. Often they are gestural, pictorial, or mediated through a computer interface.
- Gordon Pask

It seems to me that the notion of machine that was current in the course of the Industrial Revolution – and which we might have inherited – is a notion, essentially, of a machine without goal, it had no goal ‘of’, it had a goal ‘for’. And this gradually developed into the notion of machines with goals ‘of’, like thermostats, which I might begin to object to because they might compete with me. Now we’ve got the notion of a machine with an underspecified goal, the system that evolves. This is a new notion, nothing like the notion of machines that was current in the Industrial Revolution, absolutely nothing like it. It is, if you like, a much more biological notion, maybe I’m wrong to call such a thing a machine; I gave that label to it because I like to realise things as artifacts, but you might not call the system a machine, you might call it something else.
- Gordon Pask

Holists are distinguished from serialists in terms of the number of inferential statements they produce... It is possible to distinguish the serialist from the holist by a tendency, on the part of a serialist, to preserve the order of the programme presentation format which is absent in the holist. Presented with a holist programme the serialist is unable to preserve the complete order but he does manage to preserve sequentially arranged fragments.
- Gordon Pask

Consistency of the person's strategic preference across tests is curiously high.
- Gordon Pask

Serialists fall into difficulties if they fail to distinguish the wood from the trees and consequently try to assimilate masses of sparsely related irrelevant information
- Gordon Pask

Since human beings are highly adaptable it may be possible for an individual with any sort of competence to learn, in the end, according to any teaching strategy. But the experiments show, very clearly indeed, that the rate, quality and durability of learning is crucially dependent upon whether or not the teaching strategy is of a sort that suits the individual
- Gordon Pask