The student who uses home made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments, to which he is apt to trust and which he dares not take to pieces.
Interpretation
Learning from mistakes and hands-on experience is often more valuable than relying on perfect tools.
In this quote, James Clerk Maxwell emphasizes the importance of practical experience in learning. He suggests that students who work with imperfect or homemade tools gain deeper insights and understanding from their failures and troubleshooting experiences, compared to those who only rely on well-calibrated instruments they may be hesitant to explore or question.
In practice
During a workshop on innovation, this quote can inspire students to embrace trial and error.
Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena, but that we may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.
... that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.
Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.
What's the go of that? What's the particular go of that?
I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.
If we betake ourselves to the statistical method, we do so confessing that we are unable to follow the details of each individual case, and expecting that the effects of widespread causes, though very different in each individual, will produce an average result on the whole nation, from a study of which we may estimate the character and propensities of an imaginary being called the Mean Man.
I never need to find time to read. When people say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, I love reading. I would love to read, but I just don’t have time,’ I’m thinking, ‘How can you not have time?’ I read when I’m drying my hair. I read in the bath. I read when I’m sitting in the bathroom. Pretty much anywhere I can do the job one-handed, I read.
We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.
Everyone knows that at the age of 11-12, children have a marked impulse to form themselves into groups and that the respect paid to the rules and regulations of their play constitutes an important feature of this social life.
Our attitude towards ourselves should be 'to be satiable in learning' and towards others 'to be tireless in teaching.
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.
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