Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

Teachers may think they are stuffing minds, but all they are ever affecting is the memory. Nothing can ever be forced into anyone's mind except by brainwashing, which is the very opposite of genuine teaching.

The role of the educator is one of tranquil possession of certitude in regard to the teaching of not only contents but also of 'correct thinking.'

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Proper history teaching is being crushed under the weight of play-based pedagogy which infantilises children, teachers and our culture.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

The mere imparting of information is not education.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

I really feel strongly that we don't need to dumb things down for children.

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

I like my mind being stimulated. I like discovering new concepts.

Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

Teaching how to think is better than lecturing how to do it.

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.

Television is a constant stream of fact, opinions, lies, moral dilemmas, plots: an infinitely complex and sophisticated torrent of information. How could it not make you cleverer? The only people who ever thought television rotted the brain and made kids dumb were those with a vested interest in other ways of learning, or those who were intellectually insecure, usually about books.

Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.

Are our ways of teaching students to ask some questions always correlative with our ways of teaching them not to ask - indeed, to be unconscious of - others? Does the educational system exist in order to promulgate knowledge, or is its main function rather to universalize a society’s tacit agreement about what it has decided it does not and cannot know?

Nothing is better for my playing than teaching because when you teach, you have to think and you have to listen what other people do. And then all of a sudden, you play yourself and then you say, my goodness, I don't need a teacher. I'm my own teacher. Then I can react to what I'm doing immediately. It really improves.

The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.

If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.

Books have always a secret influence on the understanding; we cannot at pleasure obliterate ideas; he that reads books of science, thogh without any fixed desire of improvement, will grow more knowing.

Educated fools; from uneducated schools.