The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation ~ Thomas Alva Edison
2 comments:
This is the difference between doctrine and dogma. What is the case epsecially in Africa is that people are taught what to think with little or no room given to rationalisation. No wonder then that people keep doing what they have always done even though they desperately want different outcomes. Until the flexibility of mind that goes with 'how to think' is rolled out, change will be painfully slow.
Absolutely true. A good friend of mine recently said that we need to have root knowledge basically an understanding of what lies at the root of everything we study and aspire for. How did we arrive at our systems and institutions? Did we think this through or we just believed that just because it worked elsewhere, it will work here?
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