The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it.
Interpretation
Education aims to eliminate ignorance rather than accept it.
This quote emphasizes that the primary goal of education is to dispel ignorance and foster understanding and knowledge. It suggests that true education should challenge existing misconceptions and promote critical thinking, rather than simply confirming what is already known or believed without question.
In practice
This quote would be perfect to use in a speech about the importance of critical thinking in schools.
The one experience that I hope every student has at some point in their lives is to have some belief you profoundly, deeply hold, proved to be wrong because that is the most eye-opening experience you can have, and as a scientist, to me, is the most exciting experience I can ever have.
If our species is to survive, our future will probably require outposts beyond our own planet.
The ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models.
I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.
To the extent that we even understand string theory, it may imply a massive number of possible different universes with different laws of physics in each universe, and there may be no way of distinguishing between them or saying why the laws of physics are the way they are. And if I can predict anything, then I haven't explained anything.
The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.
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.
Some women have a weakness for shoes... I can go barefoot if necessary. I have a weakness for books.
I didn't go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life.
I hope that you have re-read the Constitution of the United States in these past few weeks. Like the Bible, it ought to be read again and again.
The person who wins the Nobel Prize is not the person who read the most journal articles and took the most notes on them. It's the person who knew what to look for. And cultivating that capacity to seek what's significant, always willing to question whether you're on the right track - that's what education is going to be about, whether it's using computers and the Internet, or pencil and paper, or books.
Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.
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