One of the main truths of all education is that if the young are not always right, the old are always wrong.
Interpretation
Education encompasses the idea that the perspectives of the young can challenge those of the old, highlighting a cyclical nature of knowledge and understanding.
This quote by R. H. Tawney reflects the dynamic relationship between generations in the context of education. It suggests that while young people may not always possess the correct insights, older individuals often hold outdated or incorrect views, indicating that knowledge is not static and that each generation must reassess and question the wisdom passed down to them. The quote encourages a critical approach to learning and generational dialogue, emphasizing the importance of new perspectives in shaping understanding.
In practice
This quote can be used in a seminar on intergenerational learning.
I really see no harm which can come of giving our children a little knowledge of physiology. ... The instruction must be real, based upon observation, eked out by good explanatory diagrams and models, and conveyed by a teacher whose own knowledge has been acquired by a study of the facts; and not the mere catechismal parrot-work which too often usurps the place of elementary teaching.
A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. [β¦] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)
Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.
The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.
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.
An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
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