What if Albert Einstein, Aristotle, Steve Jobs and the other most prominent thinkers drew round the same table and discussed the issues regarding education? We’ve imagined such a situation which resulted in a captivating conversation that couldn’t have happened in real life but is quite feasible on our website.
Plato: I believe that someday, in the distant future, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will develop a new equivalent of our classrooms. They will spend many hours in front of boxes with fires glowing within. May they have the wisdom to know the difference between light and knowledge.
Aristotle: Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
Henry David Thoreau: But what does education do? It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook.
Steve Jobs: In school I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.
Mark Twain: In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
Albert Einstein: Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one learnt in school.
Oscar Wilde: Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.`
Aristotle: Exactly my thoughts. The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
Plato: Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.
Henry David Thoreau: Precisely. How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Oscar Wilde: I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
Mark Twain: Look. All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.
Albert Einstein: I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again. The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
Steve Jobs: The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
Aristotle: Those who educate children well are more to be honoured than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
Plato: I concur and may I add. Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
Oscar Wilde: Hmmm. To define is to limit.
Albert Einstein: Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
Mark Twain: That’s my point. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond whereas the cauliflower is nothing but Cabbage with a College Education.
Henry David Thoreau: So to sum up. Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty and the obedient must be slaves.
Steve Jobs: The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.
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