Education and the generation of new ideas

It is an honor to be invited to participate in this panel discussion and to be entrusted with as provocative a topic as the relationship between education and the nascence of new ideas and points of view. Being very imperfectly educated myself and having had no new ideas that anyone would take seriously, I can at least bring an objective point of view to my discussion. The topic is too vast to undertake without some limitations, for education is, properly speaking, the entire phenomenon of intellectual growth, and I would like to conceive of it in this context as the later stages of the formal educational or schooling processes. New ideas have come to men at all times of life, though the more imaginative ones seem to have been brought by the angel of inspiration between the callowness of extreme youth and the onset of age‐encrusted patterns of thought: tangential mental openings that these men and women were informed enough to discern and yet bold and uninhibited enough to pursue.

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