Category: Making Minds Less Well Educated Than Our Own

Erlbaum: 2004.

The catalysts of reason

School ought not be about factual knowledge. That simply shouldn’t matter. Facts aren’t so clear cut anyway, and it is hard to remember them unless you can make regular use of them. Education ought to be about preparation for real life. The intellectual issue in real life is reasoning, not recitation. We need to avoid telling students how things are and instead help them discover things for themselves. The job of a school and a teacher is to serve as the catalyst for that discovery. [22]