Steven Pinker Quotes

We will have a lot of video sessions and it will get mind-blowing for the guys. The training sessions are forcing you to be really concentrated and therefore I want them to discuss it, for them to come to me. It is all about input, it's about mindset.

I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers.

The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Good education is so important. We do need to look at the way people are taught. It not just about qualifications to get a job. It's about being educated.

Economists who have studied the relationship between education and economic growth confirm what common sense suggests: The number of college degrees is not nearly as important as how well students develop cognitive skills, such as critical thinking and problem-solving ability.

Going to college is neither necessary nor sufficient to be well-educated.

Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.

I believe everything learned in college is an answer to a question that someone has posed. Questions get posed differently and the answers that come back transport us to places we never knew existed.

Education is the key. But it's the kind of education that we teach that is the key. We don't have it.

The mere imparting of information is not education.

One of the reasons I'm so passionate about science is that it wasn't correctly taught to me. I got excited at university.

Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention. Sometimes we can't even answer the simplest questions.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

We have placed more emphasis on grades and school ranking than on genuine education.

What passes for a curriculum in today's schools is little else than a strategy of distraction... It is largely defined to keep students from knowing themselves and their environment in any realistic sense; which is to say, it does not allow inquiry into most of the critical problems that comprise the content of the world outside the school.

People must be educated not only with accurate information but also with the aim of shaping new attitudes.

I have not the advantage of a classical education, and no man should, in my judgement, accept a degree he cannot read.

The Internet is an open sewer of unfiltered, untreated information. The Internet can make you smarter, faster than anything else in the world. It can also make you dumber faster.

… the debate of the understudies

Education is the foundation of social progress and economic development.

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it .... For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?

A good education alters the judgment and manners…

If we educate our kids well, they will be more competitive.

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.”