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Quote by Lailah Gifty Akita

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Lailah Gifty Akita

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“Children, in a very real sense, have beginners’ minds, open to wider possibilities. They see the world with fresher eyes, are less burdened with preconception and past experience, and are less guided by what they know to be true. They are more likely to pick up details that adults might discard as irrelevant. Because they’re less concerned with being wrong or looking foolish, children often ask questions that adults won’t ask.”

ChildrenLearningQuestions
Book:Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning
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“The second obstacle to liberal education is our condition as heirs of intellectual traditions. Here again, it is man’s own rational nature that brings this obstacle about. Animals do not pass on their skills to their progeny in such a way that those skills can accumulate and grow. Man, and only man, does precisely that. His skills and knowledges are many-storied edifices. Each generation adds something to what has been previously built and preserved. We are proud of this fact and call it progress. And, indeed, such progress does exist in definite areas. But this very fact confronts us with the ever-present danger of sedimentation, fossilisation, or petrification of our knowledge. We are fond of pointing to the European universities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which exhibit those petrifying tendencies rather clearly and are prone to exalt the fresh wind of the Renaissance and Humanism that blew all the accumulated dust away. But it behooves us to look at our own institutions of higher learning and to discern these same tendencies among us. We are not immune. This danger is inherent in all learning and all scholarship, and liberal education can never ignore it.”

PhilosophyLearningLiberal EducationJacob Klein
Book:Lectures and Essays
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