Whitehead on Education
"Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful." - A.N.Whitehead on what he called "inert ideas" - ideas that are disconnected scraps of information, with no application to real life or culture.
"For Whitehead, education should be the exact opposite of the multidisciplinary, value-free school model – it should be transdisciplinary, and laden with values and general principles that provide students with a bedrock of wisdom and help them to make connections between areas of knowledge that are usually regarded as separate." (wikipedia)
"Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts. It works by eliciting the general principles which apply to the facts, as they exist, and then by an intellectual survey of alternative possibilities which are consistent with those principles. It enables men to construct an intellectual vision of a new world." - A.N.Whitehead
The following quotes on "knowledge" are fascinating:
“The really profound changes in human life all have their ultimate origin in knowledge pursued for its own sake” - A.N.Whitehead
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them" - A.N.Whitehead
