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"Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations."
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Exlpore more Education quotes
"Education is not only learning the information, but it is also about gaining experience to unlock the door to wisdom."
"Intellectual death is endemic in areas where people are not prepared to gain new information for development. Learning is the intervention!"
"Reading with an eye towards metaphor allows us to become the person we're reading about, while reading about them. That's why there is symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if the author intended the symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author's intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as a we ourselves."
"Education enhances the beauty of the mind by learning to see the beauty in every little thing."
"Eradicating ignorance through the establishment of information centers."
"Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement."
"Literature is life."
"The principal goal of education in schools is to teach students basic knowledge and kindle mindsets that know how to think better and to understand the world in which they live."
"Correct teaching brings out human excellence."
Explore more quotes by Steven Pinker
"Much can be gained be contrasting a theory with its alternatives, even ones that look too extreme to be true. You can really understand something when you know what it is not."
"The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd."
"Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point."
"In hermetic isolation, all kinds of bizarre and toxic ideas can fester. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and exposing a bad idea to the critical glare of other minds provides at least a chance that it will wither and die."
"Legal investigation. As Clinton noted, "My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful."
"Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs."
"Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language."
"Positive legacy of the 1960s was the revolutions in civil rights, women's rights, children's rights, and gay rights, which began to consolidate power in the 1990s as the baby boomers became the establishment. Their targeting of rape, battering, hate crimes, gay-bashing, and child abuse reframed law-and-order from a reactionary cause to a progressive one, and their efforts to make the home, workplace, schools, and streets safer for vulnerable groups (as in the feminist "Take Back the Night protests) made these environments safer for everyone."
"The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there's nothing wrong with being gay. I don't find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason."
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