Education Reveals How Wrong Information Is
An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious—just dead wrong.
Memes tagged “education”
221–240 of 260
Avicenna Describes His Learning
At night I would return home, set out a lamp before me, and devote myself to reading and writing. Whenever sleep overcame me or I became conscious of weakening, I would turn aside to drink a cup of wine, so that my strength would return to me. Then I would return to reading. And whenever sleep seized me I would see…
A Wish for Children to Understand the Physical Sciences
If one might wish for impossibilities, I might then wish that my children might be well versed in physical science, but in due subordination to the fulness and freshness of their knowledge on moral subjects. ... Rather than have it the principal thing in my son's mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went…
Adults Should Share in Children's Discovery to Relive Their Own
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
School Kills Scientific Inquiry
Again, in the customs and institutions of schools, academies, colleges, and similar bodies destined for the abode of learned men and the cultivation of learning, everything is found adverse to the progress of science. For the lectures and exercises there are so ordered that to think or speculate on anything out of the…
The Myth of the Educated Parent
Remarkably enough, the most obvious influence over children's language development turned out to be the mere amount of parents' talking; children whose parents addressed or responded to them more in early life had larger, faster-growing vocabularies and scored higher on IQ tests than children whose parents spoke fewer…
How to Provide Language Enrichment to Children
First of all, language stimulation should begin very early: by just three years of age, children are already headed down vastly different paths of verbal achievement as a result of their cumulative experience with language. Ideally, language stimulation should begin at birth, since we know that newborns' brains are…
Being a Responsive and Involved Parent
Responsiveness is closely related to nurturing. For infants, responsive caregiving means not only prompt responding to a baby's physical needs interaction. Babies do cry out of boredom and their verbalizatinn—all that interaction. Babies do cry out of boredom, and their verbalization—all that enchanting cooing and…
Mozart and Intelligence
One of the more startling findings about early enrichment is the effect of music. You can hardly pick up a newspaper without seeing some kind of reference to how Mozart makes people smarter. The governor of Georgia recently proposed spending $105,000 of state money to provide every newborn baby with a compact disc of…
When Babies Learn Categorization
However, there is some surprising evidence that young babies are actually not particularly interested if a blue toy car goes in one edge of the screen and a yellow toy duck emerges at the far edge on the same trajectory! A grown-up would assume the duck that came out was brand-new and the other toy was still there…
Vygotsky's View of Child Learning
Vygotsky saw that adults, and especially parents, were a kind of tool that children used to solve the problem of knowledge. in contrast to our—probably necessary—parental megalomania. Vygotsky noticed, for example, how adults, quite unconsciously, adjusted their behavior to give children just the information they…
Human History is a Race Between Education and Catastrophe
One cannot foretell the surprises or disappointments the future has in store. Before this chapter of the World State can begin fairly in our histories, other chapters as yet unsuspected may still need to be written, as long and as full of conflict as our account of the growth and rivalries of the Great Powers. There…
Using the n-back Game to Improve Children's IQ
Scientists typically describe intelligence as consisting of two distinct components: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence refers to the general ability to solve new problems and recognize unfamiliar patterns. Crystallized intelligence, by contrast, consists of particular kinds of…
The Night Listening Game
The sound of the insect orchestra swells and throbs night after night, from midsummer until autumn ends and the frosty nights make the tiny players stiff and numb, and finally the last note is stilled in the long cold. An hour of hunting out the small musicians by flashlight is an adventure any child would love. It…
Teaching Children Wonder Does Not Require a Scientific Background
A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to…
Teaching Children Science by Drawing Nature
The British and Irish emphasis on drawing from nature (which has lessened in those places, too) helped develop powers of observation and reinforced curiosity about the natural world. A child who has watched whirligigs and water striders on the surface of a stream will appreciate the importance of clean water. A child…
The Science on the Path
A weed plucked at the side of the path might have found its way to the New World in a seventeenth century sailing ship. Scratches on a rocky ledge evoke colossal mountain-building events on the other side of the world millions of years ago that modified the planet's climate and caused glaciers to creep across New…
Ignorance is Slavery
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (natura-liter maiorennes), nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I…
The Enlightenment was not an "Enlightened Age"
If it is now asked, "Do we presently live in an enlightened age?" the answer is, "No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment." As matters now stand, a great deal is still lacking in order for men as a whole to be, or even to put themselves into a position to be able without external guidance to apply understanding…
Knowledge Shows us What We Don't Know
Scientific learning is composed of two opposites which nonetheless meet each other. The first is the natural ignorance that is man's lot at birth. The second is represented by those great minds that have investigated all knowledge accumulated by man only to discover at the end that in fact they know nothing. Thus they…