Education Quote by Donald Norman

The giveaway is the slyly loaded phrase "We expert teachers". Norman is doing two things at once: staking authority and puncturing a stubborn fantasy in science-and-tech culture that learning is a clean, rational pipeline. If you’re an engineer, you want instruction to work like code: input facts, output competence. Norman, famous for arguing that design succeeds or fails in the messy human layer of perception, attention, and feeling, smuggles that same argument into the classroom.

The intent isn’t to romanticize teaching; it’s to reframe it as applied psychology. "Motivation and emotional impact" reads almost like a rebuke to content-obsessed pedagogy and to institutions that treat knowledge as transferable regardless of medium. The subtext: expertise doesn’t scale by lecturing harder. You can’t brute-force comprehension; you have to recruit the learner’s internal reasons for caring, and you have to make the experience memorable enough to stick.

Context matters because Norman’s broader work (think The Design of Everyday Things and his writing on emotional design) insists that cognition is embodied and biased. People learn through friction, delight, shame, curiosity, belonging. That’s not a soft add-on; it’s the mechanism. His wording also hints at a quiet power move: expert teachers "know" this, implying that anyone who ignores emotion is not merely mistaken, but amateur.

It lands because it’s uncomfortably practical: motivation is the hidden prerequisite in every syllabus, and emotional impact is the real delivery system for meaning.