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Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism.

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.

I believe that if we want our children to understand the world beyond their classroom, we must bring the world into their classroom.

The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.

Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise, teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement.

I think children learn from example. I don't believe in raising them in an authoritative atmosphere.

Children take in more information than we'd like to believe.

I would rather trust my child to a serpent than to a teacher who does not believe in God.

The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.

If we are going to have to worry all the time that we might offend some students' sensibilities, we are not going to be able to teach in a way that actually matters. We're not going to be able to teach about sex, gender, race, religion, or violence.