Lecture -- Universities and Education 1933

A school textbook is, by definition, an unreadable book. The fact that I am an entirely uneducated man is due to the fact that I never could read schoolbooks of any kind. The time I was supposed to devote to reading schoolbooks I [spent in] reading real books--books written by people who really write, which is never the case with the authors of textbooks.

Be careful, as I say, to read the real books and just do enough of your textbooks to prevent your being ignominiously kicked out of the university. Read the good books, the real books, and steep yourselves in all the revolutionary books. . . . If you dont begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you are a red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!

. . . Always argue with your teacher. If possible, if you have a professor of history who gives you his views on history, what you have got to say is, "Now, look here, we have heard your views, but what we are going to do is to find another professor history who disagrees with you." (You will find that very easily.) "Now let us hear you two argue it out."

Always learn things controversially. You will find there is a continual plot to teach you one side of a thing dogmatically. A great many young men come to the university who are entirely incapable of profiting, and yet you have to give them degrees; consequently you teach them something by which they can answer questions.

If you taught them that there are two sides to a question, they would be hopelessly confused. To pass an examination never ascertain the truth of any question that is asked. Go to your teacher and ask, "What is the answer I am expected to make to that question?"

. . . Like a ragpicker going over the dust-heaps of history, you have to evaluate what you find, keep the sound things, and forget the rest as completely as possible. Then you will go about like an educated man; you will go about with a few things worth remembering. The man who keeps everything not worth remembering often attains the highest university degree. The only thing you can do with such a man is to bury him.

 

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