Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on September 24, 2019
… is from page 295 of Thomas Sowell’s 2009 book Intellectuals and Society:
By encouraging or even requiring students to take stands when they have neither the knowledge nor the intellectual training to seriously examine complex issues, teachers promote the expression of unsubstantiated opinions, the venting of uninformed emotions, and the habit of acting on those opinions and emotions while ignoring or dismissing opposing views, without having either the intellectual equipment or the personal experience to weigh one view against another in a serious way.
DBx: Indeed.
And nothing is more childish than supposing that youth supplies an especially rich source of knowledge and wisdom about social and economic matters – matters that are inherently complex and involve the making of countless trade-offs at the level of the individual.
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