Before I knew that a man could kill a man, because it happens all the time. Now I know that even the person with whom you've shared food, or whom you've slept, even he can kill you with no trouble. The closest neighbor can kill you with his teeth: that is what I have Learned since the genocide, and my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world.
Boys' brains are being digitally rewired for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights how digital exposure alters boys' learning processes, making conventional education methods ineffective.
Philip Zimbardo's quote addresses the significant impact of digital technology on boys' cognitive development. He suggests that the modern digital landscape, which constantly stimulates novelty and excitement, contrasts sharply with traditional educational methods that are static and less engaging. This mismatch leads to difficulties in adapting to conventional classrooms, as boys may struggle to focus in an environment that does not match their digitally accustomed brains.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a presentation about modern education methods, one could use this quote to emphasize the need for reform in teaching strategies.
More from Philip Zimbardo
All quotes βEvil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse.
Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.
Many cults start off with high ideals that get corrupted by leaders or their board of advisors who become power-hungry and dominate and control members' lives. No group with high ideals starts off as a 'cult'; they become one when their errant ways are exposed.
Heroes are Ordinary People whose social action is Extra-Ordinary/ who ACT when others are passive, who give up EGO-centrism for SOCIO-centrism.
Bullies may be the perpetrators of evil, but it is the evil of passivity of all those who know what is happening and never intervene that perpetuates such abuse.
Similar quotes
Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
Like a stool which needs three legs to be stable, mathematics education needs three components: good problems, with many of them being multi-step ones, a lot of technical skill, and then a broader view which contains the abstract nature of mathematics and proofs. One does not get all of these at once, but a good mathematics program has them as goals and makes incremental steps toward them at all levels.
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.
All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.