Skip to main content

A few more words to the wise...

[various sources]

Theories and goals of education don’t matter a whit if you do not consider your students to be human beings. — Lou Ann Walker

Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the
people who prepare for it today.
— Malcolm X [that's one scary bloke]

There are young people out there cutting raw cocaine with chemicals from the local hardware store. They are manufacturing new highs and new products buy soaking marijuana in ever changing agents, and each of these new drugs is more addictive, more deadly and less costly than the last. How is it that we have failed to tap that ingenuity, that sense of experimentation? How is it that these kids who can measure grams and kilos and can figure out complex monetary transactions cannot pass a simple math or chemistry test? — Senator Kohl, from the U.S. Senate Hearing: “Crisis in Math and Science Education.”

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened. — Douglas Adams, from his book: “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”

Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless. — Max Born

The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done — men who are creative, inventive and discoverers. — Jean Piaget

People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have. — John Holt

That’s why it comes back to math. Math has no bias. It doesn’t come from TV. It doesn’t know what you’re wearing. Math treats all people equally. Especially when you’re in a hard class with all boys, when nobody’s cheering you on from the sidelines, when it’s not “cool” to be smart, math is a nice thing to have. When nothing else makes sense, math reaches an answer. — Rebecca L. Eisenberg, in Girls Need Math, in the Examiner.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has. — Margaret Meade

The most important outcome of education is to help students become independent of formal education. — Paul E Gray

Knowledge is a comfortable and necessary retreat and shelter for us in an advanced age; and if we do not plant it while young, it will give us no shade when we grow old. — Lord Chesterfield

Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other. — Emma Goldman

The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. — Paul Karl Feyerabend

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they’re going to catch you in next. — Franklin P Jones

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn. — John Cotton Dana

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think. — James Beattie

Mildly, moderately, highly and extraordinarily gifted children are
as different from each other as mildly, moderately, severely and profoundly retarded children are from each other, but the differences among levels of giftedness are rarely recognized.
— Dr. Linda Silverman

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. — Henry Brooks Adams

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, “We’ve always done it this way.” I try to fight that. That’s why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise. — Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

Resisting conformity and developing some small eccentricities are among the steps to independence and self-confidence. — A L McGinnis

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know. — Gilbert K Chesterton

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. — Bertrand Russell

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. — Thomas Huxley

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. — Decouvertes

Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work. — Thomas Edison

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge. — Daniel Boorstin

Expecting all children the same age to learn from the same materials is like expecting all children the same age to wear the same size clothing. — Madeline Hunter

The one real goal of education is to leave a person asking questions. — Max Beerhohm

Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker’s already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs. — Florence King

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion — these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness. — Jerome S. Bruner

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yates

Do not judge my intelligence by the answers I give, but instead by the questions I ask. — Mark McGranaghan

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. — John Maynard Keynes

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius... — Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Valley of Fear”

Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental... The freedom to learn... has been bought by bitter sacrifice. And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe, but what we do not believe; not only what our leaders say, but what the leaders of other groups and nations, and the leaders of other centuries have said. We must insist upon this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can have a real chance to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be. — W E B DuBois

One can succeed at almost anything for which he has enthusiasm. — Charles Schwab

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t. — Malcolm S Forbes

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him — Jonathan Swift

Great minds have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. — Albert Einstein

Trying to understand vision by studying only neurons is like trying to understand bird flight by studying only feathers: it just cannot be done. — David Marr

While I was gone, someone stole everything in my apartment and replaced it with an exact replica. When I told my roommate, he said, “Do I know you?” — Stephen Wright

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. — Winston Churchill

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

An Open and Shut response to Darl McBride

Hi, Darl. I see you’re being dishonest again . It’d be really nice if you could shoot straight for a change, but I think Kerry’s Dad will be selling snowplows in Hell first. Three years ago, when I first joined The SCO Group, we focused the company on the area that was most profitable and provided the most benefit to customers, investors, resellers, developers and employees: UNIX No, you focused the company on suing people, which was most profitable to lawyers and provided some golden parachutes for your buddies. People thought we were crazy. They were right. But since SCO owns the UNIX operating system The SCO Group does not own UNIX® in any sense of the word. The Open Group owns the UNIX trademark, definition and other rights , The SCO Group does not. The SCO Group doesn’t even own the UnixWare® or OpenServer® code, the rights to those are held by Novell and TSG use them only by permission and under certain conditions — which they have violate...

5x7 text dot-matrix in five minutes...

This is a fairly primitive toy I threw together today for a specific purpose, published in case it’s any use to others... feed it a list of words as command arguments, which it will then display as a 5x7 ASCII dotmatrix with ‘#’ as a dot & ‘_’ as a blank. /* * display text using a 5x7 bitmap font in ASCII letters */ static unsigned char font [] [5] = { { 0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00 }, // 0x20 32 { 0x00,0x00,0x6f,0x00,0x00 }, // ! 0x21 33 { 0x00,0x07,0x00,0x07,0x00 }, // " 0x22 34 { 0x14,0x7f,0x14,0x7f,0x14 }, // # 0x23 35 { 0x00,0x07,0x04,0x1e,0x00 }, // $ 0x24 36 { 0x23,0x13,0x08,0x64,0x62 }, // % 0x25 37 { 0x36,0x49,0x56,0x20,0x50 }, // & 0x26 38 { 0x00,0x00,0x07,0x00,0x00 }, // ' 0x27 39 { 0x00,0x1c,0x22,0x41,0x00 }, // ( 0x28 40 { 0x00,0x41,0x22,0x1c,0x00 }, // ) 0x29 41 { 0x14,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x14 }, // * 0x2a 42 { 0x08,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x08 }, ...

Citizens Augmenting Government Waste

So here we have Microsoft-funded “ Citizens Against Government Waste ” (CAGW) heavily criticising Massachusetts’s switch to an internationally accepted and open document standard (not open source, open standard — but I seem to remember a large monopolist who frequently confuses the two when it suits them). I remember CAGW, they were the organisation who had dead people writing in to support Microsoft in court a few years ago — thanks to sbergman27 for the link — is this “the dead hand of CAGW” at work again? Let’s follow the money and find out. Who stands to lose the most money and control if Massachusetts switches to an unencumbered document format? Big surprise, it’s CAGW sponsor Microsoft, through their dominant MS-Office suite. Why did CAGW list Microsoft’s suite last, after two other much-less-dominant examples which are waning anyway? If you’re inclined to wallow in additional irony, consider that at leas...