Before I knew that a man could kill a man, because it happens all the time. Now I know that even the person with whom you've shared food, or whom you've slept, even he can kill you with no trouble. The closest neighbor can kill you with his teeth: that is what I have Learned since the genocide, and my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world.
Boys' brains are being digitally rewired for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights how digital exposure alters boys' learning processes, making conventional education methods ineffective.
Philip Zimbardo's quote addresses the significant impact of digital technology on boys' cognitive development. He suggests that the modern digital landscape, which constantly stimulates novelty and excitement, contrasts sharply with traditional educational methods that are static and less engaging. This mismatch leads to difficulties in adapting to conventional classrooms, as boys may struggle to focus in an environment that does not match their digitally accustomed brains.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a presentation about modern education methods, one could use this quote to emphasize the need for reform in teaching strategies.
More from Philip Zimbardo
All quotes βEvil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse.
Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.
Many cults start off with high ideals that get corrupted by leaders or their board of advisors who become power-hungry and dominate and control members' lives. No group with high ideals starts off as a 'cult'; they become one when their errant ways are exposed.
Heroes are Ordinary People whose social action is Extra-Ordinary/ who ACT when others are passive, who give up EGO-centrism for SOCIO-centrism.
Bullies may be the perpetrators of evil, but it is the evil of passivity of all those who know what is happening and never intervene that perpetuates such abuse.
Similar quotes
Children are the most wonderful audiences. What's struck me most is that that they watch it so silently, until the end when they shriek and shout and clap.
First let a man teach himself, and then he will be taught by others.
We need to align the incentives so that colleges have an incentive to keep down their costs... to graduate students on time with degrees in areas where they're going to be able to get jobs and going to be able to pay back those loans.
We need all hands on deck, and that means clearing hurdles for women and girls as they navigate careers in science, technology, engineering, and math.
Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.
I learned to read a little in my primer, to write my own name, and to cypher some in the three first rules in figures. And this was all the schooling I ever had in my life, up to this day. I should have continued longer if it hadn't been that I concluded I couldn't do any longer without a wife, and so I cut out to hunt me one.