As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there.
Interpretation
Encouraging curiosity helps combat flawed thinking and misinformation.
In this quote, Neil Degrasse Tyson emphasizes the importance of fostering a sense of curiosity and critical questioning in education. He believes that by encouraging individuals to scrutinize their own ideas and those of others, they become more resilient against misleading and incorrect concepts that may circulate in society, ultimately leading to clearer thinking and better understanding.
In practice
This quote can be used in a classroom to inspire students to ask more questions.
The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.
As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.
In just one year, the expenditure of of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.
A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
You go to school, you study about the Germans and the French, but not about your own race. I hope the time will come when you study black history too.
Early in my teaching days, the kids asked me the meaning of a poem. I replied, 'I don't know any more than you do. I have ideas. What are your ideas?' I realized then that we're all in the same boat. What does anybody know?
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
There's no media training. In cooking school, there's not even manager training. You learn the fundamentals of cooking. Everything else is learning by doing.
One of the great needs of Negro children is to have books about themselves and their lives that can help them be proud.
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