Thomas Sowell Quotes

It turned out I was pretty good in science. But again, because of the small budget, in science class we couldn't afford to do experiments in order to prove theories. We just believed everything. Actually, I think that class was called Religion. Religion class was always an easy class. All you had to do was suspend the logic and reasoning you were being taught in all the other classes.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.

Science is not a body of facts. Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face. It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces.

If we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate.

You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central. It's a matter of just gaining a skill or gaining access to a job to live in some vanilla suburb, as opposed to becoming a critical citizen concerned with public interest and common good.

Schools train people to be ignorant, with style. They give you the equipment that you need to be a functional ignoramus. American schools* do not equip you to deal with things like logic; they don't give you the criteria by which to judge between good and bad in any medium or format; and they prepare you to be a usable victim for military-industrial complex that needs manpower.

At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.

You explain right well, and you shew that you understand argument and are not a mere sophist since you accept that which cannot be denied.

I had inherited what my father called the art of the advocate, or the irritating habit of looking for the flaw in any argument.

Don't follow your feeling. Just follow the word.

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.

Put the money into schools. Rational ones that train young minds to think, to demand that persons in authority show the evidence for the ideas they push. Do that, and we won't need to provide a world for the Sacred Brethren who, given the opportunity, would run everyone else off the planet.

To develop thinking as a skill, it should be deliberate, focused, confident, and enjoyable.

I didn't go to Catholic school but I had a tough teacher, a tough math teacher.I remember everything that guy taught me. I really do.

Reasoning is the pastime of my whole household, and all this reasoning has driven out Reason.

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

Scientific reasoning is a dialogue between the possible and the actual, between proposal and disposal between what might be true, and what is in fact the case.

People have to live by rules in the world. Why do we pretend in school that they don't?

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Every theory in philosophy, which is built on pure conjecture, is an elephant; and every theory that is supported partly by fact, and partly by conjecture, is like Nebuchadnezzar's image, whose feet were partly of iron, and partly of clay.

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.

But what is now encompassed by the one word (“school”) are two very different kinds of institutions that, in function, finance and intention, serve entirely different roles. Both are needed for our nation’s governance. But children in one set of schools are educated to be governors; children in the other set of schools are trained for being governed. The former are given the imaginative range to mobilize ideas for economic growth; the latter are provided with the discipline to do the narrow tasks the first group will prescribe.

How scientists go about their job: and it's a process, it's a question of asking questions, respecting observation, respecting experiment, having tentative explanations and then testing them.... There is a problem sometimes with how we teach science at schools. Because we sometimes teach it as if it has been chiseled in stone.