We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought. The majority of men and women are not aware of the process by which this happens.
1w ago
The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more. But the vast majority of what gets taught in school is not actionable — it's meant to signal that you're educated, not to help you think. The moment you realize school is mostly about certification, not education, you can start actually learning.
3d ago
1w ago
The curious thing is that this passionate way of teaching Western culture is thriving right now—but outside of the West. In the US, the insiders who speak candidly will tell you that the humanities is in crisis. You can measure it in many ways—declining enrollment, shrinking departments, poor test results, increased cheating, resistance to reading, etc.
3w ago
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
1mo ago
The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress on the minute study of details, and to overlook the great generalizations. It is the study of generalizations that liberates the human mind.
1mo ago
There was just one basic problem with college as America's primary unifying institution, which is that not everyone can go to college. First of all, college is difficult. To complete college courses, you need some degree of raw intelligence, but you also need work ethic and a certain degree of independence.
1mo ago
It is a great folly to wish to be wise all alone. And it is a greater folly still to think that one can become wise by reading.
2mo ago
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. And it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.
2mo ago
To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. But a nation that destroys its children has no future worth saving.
3mo ago
A lot of the job of teaching philosophy at a public university is teaching people who don't want to learn. So I developed this preoccupation with: what would it be like if you tried to find the people who only want to learn? Suppose you could just filter for the desire to learn.
3mo ago
The mind of man may be compared to a musical instrument, and it requires to be tuned up and put in order before it can produce harmonious results.
4mo ago
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. And the worst thing you can do to a talented person is to prevent them from starting fires.
5mo ago
The mind of man is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
5mo ago
The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparent' ordinary people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.
5mo ago
The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem.
5mo ago
The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are apathetic to others, until education and experience have taught it to attend to every thing that may be of consequence.
5mo ago
A year into the pandemic, researchers found that the more time kids spent in online learning, the more depressed and anxious they got. During the second Covid wave, up to 70 per cent of teenagers in the province reported depression symptoms.
5mo ago
He argues the traditional classroom was designed for a narrow slice of students and wastes everyone else's time. The fix isn't more money or better teachers; it's rebuilding from scratch around mastery, motivation, and AI.
5mo ago
The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparently ordinary' people to unusual effort over many years.
6mo ago
The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparently ordinary' people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.
6mo ago
The chief wonder of education is that it does not destroy the mind of the pupil at all. When one considers the usual methods of teaching, this is indeed extraordinary. Yet it does happen, and I should say that in nine cases out of ten it happens by accident.
6mo ago
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
6mo ago
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
Start saving quotes →