We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
Interpretation
We should equip our children with more knowledge than we had to prepare them for the future.
Daniel Dennett emphasizes the importance of education and knowledge in empowering the younger generation. He acknowledges the fear that comes with this responsibility but stresses that failing to equip children with knowledge would lead to even greater challenges for them as they navigate the complexities of the world.
In practice
In a speech about educational reform, I could use this quote to highlight the need for better resources for children.
Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.
As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.
If the concept of consciousness were to fall to science, what would happen to our sense of moral agency and free will? If conscious experience were reduced somehow to mere matter in motion, what would happen to our appreciation of love and pain and dreams and joy? If conscious human beings were just animated material objects, how could anything we do to them be right or wrong?
When new cooks come to work for me, they obviously make mistakes at the beginning or there's some messiness to the presentation. What I always say to them is: 'If you were cooking this for your mother or your girlfriend, would you make those mistakes?'
Hillary Clinton understands that we have to invest in education and jobs for our young people, not more jails or incarceration.
It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren.
The First Book: Go ahead, it won't bite. Well... maybe a little. More a nip, like. A tingle. It's pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps on opening. You may fall in. Sure, it's hard to get started; remember learning to use knife and fork? Dig in: you'll never reach bottom. It's not like it's the end of the world -- just the world as you think you know it.
We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they'll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.
Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
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