Godfrey Hounsfield Quotes

The importance of all education lies far more in the training of minds than in any facts which may be absorbed, for trained minds will ascertain the facts as they need to know them. Having learned to reason and to weigh the information they discover, people with such minds will be more nearly educated than any amount of cramming of definite facts into their heads will make them.

The problem I have with schools is, people are taught, 'This is how you do this.' They're not taught about why you do this.

I think with every book you realize you are partway through and there is something really elementary that you should have researched.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not.

Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.

There's always a learning curve, where you've got to learn what your subject is all about.

I didn't do too well until my second year, when I realized that there were no right or wrong answers and that my professors were interested only in how well I could develop an argument.

They are deceptively simple. I admit that. But for me, all my life I try to simplify things. As a child in school, things were very hard for me to understand often, and I developed a knack, I think. I developed a process to simplify things so I would understand them.

Traditional education is based on facts and figures and passing tests - not on a comprehension of the material and its application to your life.

The most obvious purpose of college education is to help students acquire information and knowledge by acquainting them with facts, theories, generalizations, principles, and the like. This purpose scarcely requires justification.

You've never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say.

One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.

I love meeting people and analysing their world. I like having a puzzle to solve. That's why I do so much work in advance. Even if it doesn't affect my performance in the end, I just find it so much more interesting if I've got as wide as possible an understanding of the material.

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

When you are studying from a book, lots of people go straight to the end to look for the answers. But that's not my style. For me, the most enjoyable part is the puzzle, the process of solving, not the solution itself.

I still believe that education is about provoking some kind of original, creative thought.

I would say I have become a lot smarter in the way I understand things.

Perhaps more than English or history, STEM subjects require an enormous amount of foundational learning before students can become competent.

The education is the answer to everything, really, and on so many different levels. The minutiae of life require analytical skills that you learn in being educated, an ability to navigate the very systems that constitute life. They all require some degree of education, and if you don't get it, you're at a real disadvantage.

We need both information and thinking. Information is no substitute for thinking and thinking is no substitute for information.

The number of people that can reason well is much smaller than those that can reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling rocks, then several reasoners might be better than one. But reasoning isn't like hauling rocks, it's like, it's like racing, where a single, galloping Barbary steed easily outruns a hundred wagon-pulling horses.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.

Imagination is not enough. Knowledge is necessary.