-Albert Einstein (Found in Compulsory Mis-Education and the Community of Scholars by Paul Goodman, original source Examining in Harvard College)
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
- Leonardo da Vinci
"If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson (found in KDE fortunes)
"Come to me...I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me - watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you."
- the end of Matthew 11, from The Message
Math is not difficult, math is just different. Time is the elixir that turns things different into things familiar. (slightly paraphrased)
- John Saxon (founder of Saxon Publishers)
"My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement."
- Meg Ryan in Joe vs. the Volcano
"I have no special talents - I am only passionately curious."
-Albert Einstein
"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
- Isaac Newton
Sir Arthur Eddington summed up this situation brilliantly in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1929. "No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron," he said, and our best description of the atom boils down to "something unknown is doing we don't know what." He notes that this "does not sound a particularly illuminating theory. I have read something like it elsewhere-
The slithy toves
Did gyre and gimbal in the wabe"
From In Search of Schröedinger's Cat, by John Gribbin
So they went and knocked on the study door, and the Professor said "Come in," and got up and found chairs for them and said he was quite at their disposal. Then he sat listening to them with the tips of his fingers pressed together and never interrupting, till they had finished the whole story. After that he said nothing for quite a long time. Then he cleared his throat and said the last thing either of them expected:
"How do you know," he asked, "that your sister's story is not true?"
"Oh, but--" began Susan, and then stopped. Anyone could see from the old man's face that he was perfectly serious. Then Susan pulled herself together and said, "But Edmund said they had only been pretending."
"That is a point," said the Professor, "which certainly deserves consideration. For instance - if you will excuse me for asking the question - does your experience lead you to regard your brother or your sister as the more reliable? I mean, which is the more truthful?"
"That's just the funny thing about it, sir," said Peter. "Up till now, I'd have said Lucy every time."
"And what do you think, my dear?" said the Professor, turning to Susan.
"Well," said Susan, "in general I'd say the same as Peter, but this couldn't be true -- all this about the wood and the Faun."
"That is more than I know," said the Professor, "and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found to be truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed."
"We were afraid it mightn't even be lying," said Susan; "we thought there might be something wrong with Lucy."
"Madness, you mean?" said the Professor quite coolly. "Oh, you can make your minds easy about that. One has only to look at her to see that she is not mad."
"But then," said Susan, and stopped. She had never dreamed that a grown-up would talk like the Professor and didn't know what to think.
"Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth."
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
"You can shut Him up as a fool, you can spit on Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord. But let us not make up some patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
- C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity
(NOTE: Lewis is using the same logical argument in both this quote and the last)
"He's wild, you know. Not like a tame lion."
- Mrs. Beaver in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
"What is a lion?" asked the Witch.
"Oh, hang it all!" said Scrubb. "Don't you know? how can we describe it to her? Have you ever seen a cat?"
"Surely," said the Queen [Witch]. "I love cats."
"Well, a lion is a little bit--only a little bit, mind you--like a huge cat--with a mane. At least, it's not like a horse's mane, you know, it's more like a judge's wig. And it's yellow. And terrifically strong."
The Witch shook her head. "I see," she said, "that we should do no better with your lion, as you call it, than we did with your sun. Well, 'tis a pretty make-believe, though, to say truth, it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe world without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world. But even you children are too old for such play. As for you, my lord Prince, that art a man full grown, fie upon you! Are you not ashamed of such toys? Come, all of you. Put away these childish tricks. I have work for you all in the real world. There is no Narnia, no Overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan. And now, to bed all. And let us begin a wiser life tomorrow. But, first, to bed; to sleep; deep sleep, soft pillows, sleep without foolish dreams."
"One word, Ma'am," [Puddleglum] said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you've said. But there's one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."
- The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis
It's an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that's happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature. It's startling every time it occurs. One is surprised that a construct of one's own mind can actually be realized in the honest-to-goodness world out there. A great shock, and a great, great joy.
- Leo Kadanoff cited in Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
October 1, 1959
Not long ago Dr. Gattegno taught a demonstration class at Lesley-Ellis School. I don't believe I will ever forget it. It was one of the most extraordinary and moving spectacles I have seen in all my life.
The subjects chosen for this particular demonstration were a group of severely retarded children. There were about five or six fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds. Some of them, except for unusually expressionless faces, looked quite normal; the one who caught my eye was a boy at the end of the table. He was tall, pale, with black hair. I have rarely seen on a human face such anxiety and tension as showed on his. He kept darting looks around the room like a bird, as if enemies might come from any quarter left unguarded for more that a second. His tongue worked continuously in his mouth, bulging out first one cheek then the other. Under the table, he scratched-or rather clawed-at his leg with one hand. He was a terrifying and pitiful sight to see.
With no formalities or preliminaries, no ice-breaking or jollying up, Gattegno went to work. It will help you see more vividly what was going on if, providing you have rods at hand, you actually do the operations I will describe. First he took two blue (9) rods, and between them put a dark green (6), so that between the two blue rods and above the dark green there was an empty space 3 cm. long. He said to the group, "Make one like this." They did. Then he said, "Now find the rod that will just fill up that space." I don't know how the other children worked on the problem; I was watching the dark-haired boy. His movements were spasmodic, feverish. When he had picked a rod out of the pile in the center of the table, he could hardly stuff it in between his blue rods. After several trials, he and the others found that a light green (3) rod would fill the space.
Then Gattegno, holding his blue rods at the upper end, shook them, so that after a bit the dark green rod fell out. Then he turned the rods over, so that now there was a 6 cm. space where the dark green rod had formerly been. He asked the class to do the same. They did. Then he asked them to find the rod that would fill that space. Did they pick out of the pile the dark green rod that had just come out of that space? Not one did. Instead, more trial and error. Eventually, they all found that the dark green rod was needed.
Then Gattegno shook his rods so that the light green fell out, leaving the original empty 3 cm. space, and turned them again so that the empty space was uppermost. Again, he asked the children to fill the space, and again, by trial and error, they found the needed light green rod. As before, it took the dark-haired boy several trials to find the right rod. These trials seemed to be completely haphazard.
Hard as it may be to believe, Gattegno went through this cycle at least four or five times before anyone was able to pick the needed rod without hesitation and without trial and error. As I watched, I thought, "What must it be like to have so little idea of the way the world works, so little feeling for the regularity, the orderliness, the sensibleness of things?" It takes a great effort of the imagination to push oneself back, back, back to the place where we knew as little as these children. It is not just a matter of not knowing this fact or that fact; it is a matter of living in a universe which is utterly whimsical and unpredictable, where nothing has anything to do with anything else-with this difference, that these children had come to feel, as most very young children do not, that this universe is an enemy.
Then, as I watched, the dark-haired boy saw! Something went "click" inside his head, and for the first time, his hand visibly shaking with excitement, he reached without trial and error for the right rod. He could hardly stuff it into the empty space. It worked! The tongue going round in the mouth, and the hand clawing away at the leg under the table doubled their pace. When the time came to turn the rods over and fill the other empty space, he was almost too excited to pick up the rod he wanted; but he got it in. "It fits! It fits!" he said, and held up the rods for all of us to see. Many of us were moved to tears, by his excitement and joy, and by our realization of the great leap of the mind he had just taken.
After a while, Gattegno did the same problem, this time using a crimson (4) and yellow (5) rod between the blue rods. This time the black-haired boy needed only one cycle to convince himself that these were the rods he needed. This time he was calmer, surer; he knew.
Again using the rods, Gattegno showed them what we mean when we say that one thing is half of another. He used the white (1) and rd (2), and the red and the crimson (4) to demonstrate the meaning of "half." Then he asked them to find half of some of the other rods, which the dark-haired boy was able to do. Just before the end of the demonstration Gattegno showed them a brown (8) rod and asked them to find half of half of it, and this too the dark-haired boy was able to do.
I could not but feel then, as I do now, that whatever his I.Q. may be considered to have been, and however he may have reacted to life as he usually experienced it, this boy, during that class, had played the part of a person of high intelligence and had done intellectual work of very high quality. When we think of where he started, and where he finished, of the immense amount of mathematical territory that he covered in forty minutes or less, it is hard not to feel that there is an extraordinary capacity locked up inside that boy.
It is the tragedy of his life that he will probably never again find himself with a man like Gattegno, who knows, as few teachers do, that it is his business to put himself into contact with the intelligence of his students, wherever and whatever that may be, and who has enough intuition and imagination to do it. He has not done much work with retarded children, but he saw in a moment what I might have taken days or weeks to find out, or might never have found out: that to get in touch with the intelligence of these children, to give them solid ground to stand and move on, he had to go way, way back, to the very beginning of learning and understanding. Nor was this all he brought to the session. Equally important was a kind of respect for these children a conviction that under the right circumstances they could and would do first-class thinking. There was no condescension or pity in his manner, not even any noticeable sympathy. For the duration of the class he and these children were colleagues trying to work out a tough problem-and working it out.
- How Children Fail by John Holt
Gatto, on the other hand, has a very different view of Gattegno.
"[stating that we must realize that the goodness of people stems from the goodness of God]...we shall be relying on human beings. And that is going to let us down. The best of them will make mistakes; all of them will die. We must be thankful to all of the people who have helped us, we must honour them and love them. But never, never pin your entire faith on one human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand: but do not try building a house on it."
C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity
"...[educators] tell us seriously 'Such is man.' Yes, such is man, as you have made him."
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile
"‘How will they learn to read?’ you ask, and my answer is 'Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.’ [where literacy rates were higher prior to compulsory schooling] When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.
But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes, or does arithmetic gets respect. We are a land of talkers; we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach the 'basics' anymore because they really aren’t basic to the society we’ve made."
- John Taylor Gatto in Dumbing us Down
"This is probably the only case I know of where someone worked for such a long time without divulging what he was doing, without talking about the progress he was making. It's just unprecedented in my experience. In our community people have always shared their ideas. Mathematicians come together at conferences, they visit each other to give seminars, they send E-mail to each other, they talk on the telephone, they ask for insights, they ask for feedback - mathematicians are always in communication. When you talk to other people you get a pat on the back; people tell you that what you've done is important, they give you ideas. It's sort of nourishing and if you cut yourself off from this, then you are doing something that's probably psychologically very odd."
- Ken Ribet describing the working habits of Andrew Wiles, quoted in Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh
(NOTE: Yes; that's the point. Genius wouldn't be valuable if it were psychologically common. Furthermore, if there are others working in seclusion, what makes you think you would know about it?)
"Even a fool, when he keeps silent, is considered wise; when he closes his lips he is considered prudent."
- Proverbs 17:28
"The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other."
- Kurt Godel
Interviewer: At school, you thought you might be a firefighter or a coal man.
Harrison Ford: I enjoyed physical labour, still do. I could see how moving coal might be satisfying compared to going to an office and coming home frustrated.
"In work I am your man. I play and sing- I am my own I mean free... "
- Zorba the Greek
"Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything."
- Bob Dylan
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
- Robert A. Heinlein
"Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"...I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn't want to accept that notion-far from it-my own training in two elite universities taught me intelligence and talent distribute themselves economically over a bell curve and that human destiny, because of those mathematical, seemingly irrefutable, scientific facts, was as rigorously determined as John Calvin contended. The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence-insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality-that I became confused. They didn't do this often enough to make my teaching easy, but they did it often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlargen children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior."
- John Taylor Gatto in Dumbing us Down
"If you've ever tried to wrestle into line kids whose parents have taught them that they'll be loved in spite of anything, you know how impossible it is to make self-confident spirits conform. I teach that a kid's self-respect should depend on expert opinion... A monthly report, impressive in its provision, is sent into a student's home to elicit approval or mark exactly, down to a single percentage point, how dissatisfied with the child a parent should be."
- John Taylor Gatto in Dumbing us Down
"...for my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom is as great. You have no power over me. "
Sarah in The Labyrinth
"You've some skill with a blade."
"Women of this country learned long ago that those without swords can still die upon them. I fear neither death nor pain."
"What do you fear, milady?"
"A cage. To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of valor has gone beyond recall or desire."
"You are the daughter of kings. A shield-maiden of Rohan. I do not think that will be your fate."
Aragorn and Eowyn in The Two Towers
"I practice three hours a day so that when I meet a pirate, I can kill it!"
Will in Pirates of the Caribbean
"In Italy for thirty years under Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."
Orson Wells cited in Impossibility: The Science of Limits and the Limits of Science
Elwood P. Dowd: Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be" -- she always called me Elwood -- "In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. And you may quote me.
- Jimmy Stewart in Harvey
"...Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. "
- 1 Corinthians 8:1
"There isn't going to be any shire, Pippin."
Merry in The Two Towers
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
-- T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925
