Teachers Must Put Themselves in the Student's Place

According to Devlin, teachers have a responsibility to learn about kids' interests. "It's not the students' responsibility to put themselves in our place. As teachers, it's our responsibility to put ourselves in the students' place. And if they are in a digital world, where they will invest many hours solving difficult, challenging problems in a video game, it would be criminal if we didn't start where they are and take advantage of the things they want to do. That's the world they live in, t...

 Of All Times in which to Live, You Would Choose Today

I don't think in terms of one year, but I can tell people what I genuinely believe, which is that if we take responsibility in being involved in our own fate if we participate, if we engage, if we speak out, if we work in our communities, if we volunteer, if we see the joy that comes from service to others, then all the problems that we face are solvable despite all the terrible news that you see, despite all the genuine cruelty, pain, and hardship people are experiencing all around the world...

 Technical Language Can Oppress

The people who maintain the structures of science, religion, and politics have one thing in common that they don't share with the rest of society. They are responsible for creating a technical language, incomprehensible to the rest of us, whereby we cede to them our right and responsibility to think. They in turn formulate a beautiful set of lies that lull us to sleep and allow us to forget about our troubles, eventually depriving us of all rights, including, increasingly, the right to live i...

 Protecting the Environment as Protecting the Future

If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it. You grown ups say you love us. Please, take action. And for me,it is absolutely my responsibility to do whatever it takes to protect my child. When the haze gets serious, there is at least one thing we can do. That is to protect yourself and your loved ones. When I drew this little bear on paper, I was reminded of, when my daughter got sick, all my fear of losing her and all my hope of protecting her. I wish that all other mothers in...

 The Dilemma of Human Diversity Across the Cosmos

When life spreads out and diversifies in the universe, adapting itself to a spectrum of environments far wider than any one planet can encompass, the human species will one day find itself faced with the most momentous choice that we have had to make since the days when our ancestors came down from the trees in Africa and left their cousins the chimpanzees behind. We will have to choose, either to remain one species united by a common bodily shape as well as by a common history, or to let our...

 How Big Ideas are Revealed

Big ideas are typically revealed via: • Core concepts (migration, function) • Focusing themes (good vs. evil) • Ongoing debate/issues (nature vs. nurture) • Illuminating paradox/problem (freedom vs. responsibility) • Organizing theory/principle (less is more) • Underlying assumption/perspectives (Occam’s Razor) • Key questions • Insightful inferences from facts

 Everyone Can be Arrogant

Many things may become baggage, may become encumbrances if we cling to them blindly and uncriticaliy. Let us take some illustrations. Having made mistakes, you may feel that, come what may, you are saddled with them and so become dispirited; if you have not made mistakes, you may feel that you are free from error and so become conceited. Lack of achievement in work may breed pessimism and depression, while achievement may breed pride and arrogance. A comrade with a short record of struggle ma...

 Presenting Evidence is a Moral Act

Making an evidence presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity. To maintain standards of quality, relevance, and integrity for evidence, consumers of presentations should insist that presenters be held intellectually and ethically responsible for what they show and tell. Thus consuming a presentation is also an intellectual and a moral activity.

 The Computer is the Solutions to Over-Specialization

Getting ready for the assumed inexorable Armageddon, each applied science and all of the great scientific specialization capabilities only toward weaponry, thus developing the ability to destroy themselves totally with no comprehensively organized oppositional thinking capability and initiative powerful enough to co-ordinate and prevent it. Thus by 1946, we were on the swift way to extinction despite the inauguration of the United Nations, to which none of the exclusive sovereign prerogatives...

 Improve Ourselves, but Also Contribute to the Improvement...

We cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individual. Toward this end, each of us must work for his own highest development, accepting at the same time his share of responsibility in the general life of humanity—our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.