Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
Interpretation
Education can sometimes hinder critical thinking and creativity.
Bertrand Russell emphasizes that ignorance is a natural state at birth, but the educational system can impose limitations on individuals that lead to a lack of true understanding or critical thought. This quote suggests that formal education should encourage questioning and independent thought rather than merely instilling rote knowledge.
In practice
During a lecture on the limitations of traditional education, this quote can serve as a thought-provoking starting point for discussion.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
When you're writing for the Internet, you have the analytics, and you know that people are bailing every second. But various people kept reminding me that once people have bought a book, they're in. You don't have to be selling them on every page.
Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.
Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift.
We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
Failing well is a skill. Letting girls do it gives them critical practice coping with a negative experience. It also gives them the opportunity to develop a kind of confidence and resilience that can only be forged in times of challenge.
The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.
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