Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

By no definition of any modern scientist is intelligent design science, and it's a waste of our students' time to subject them to it.

In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking.

Students don't know who Mark Twain was because he wasn't on the test.

History should be written as philosophy.

I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.

We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.

School systems should base their curriculum not on the idea of separate subjects, but on the much more fertile idea of disciplines... which makes possible a fluid and dynamic curriculum that is interdisciplinary.

Teachers are not supposed to be repositories of information which they dish out. That is from an age when there were no other repositories of information, other than books or teachers, neither of which were portable. A lot of my big task is retraining these teachers.

For any reporter, education is a topic where everything else - money, politics, et cetera - intersects. I have four kids in K through 12, so I'm knee-deep in it. I'm really interested in the philosophy behind it all. Should you just memorize your multiplication tables, or should you understand the concept behind them?

Women tend to be more intuitive, or to admit to being intuitive, and maybe the hard science approach isn't so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.

Science class is traditionally taught as science history class - you learn all these facts that someone else discovered, which you need to know, but that's not really an inspiring way to learn science.

Schools ought to teach students to challenge secular ideologies masquerading as science in the classroom.

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.

Courses on historical methodology are not worth the time that they take up. I shall never give one myself, and I have observed that many of my colleagues who do give such courses refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything.

I have learned that, although I am a good teacher, I am a much better student, and I was blessed to learn valuable lessons from my students on a daily basis. They taught me the importance of teaching to a student - and not to a test.

I think a lot of teachers feel like they're teaching to a test. Our response is you teach to a student, you really teach to the kid.

I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.

I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.

We've heard from many teachers that they used episodes of Star Trek and concepts of Star Trek in their science classrooms in order to engage the students.

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

… to develop a plan to promote better science education

When you have teachers saying, 'I don't have enough time for hands-on activities,' we need to rethink the way we do education.

One of the tragedies of our educational system is that we've taken this incredibly interesting subject - how the universe works - and made it boring.

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.

Sometimes I think people confuse rote learning with traditional conceptual instruction.