Joel Henry Hildebrand Quotes

#1. Instead of adjusting students to docile membership in whatever group they happen to be placed, we should equip them to cope with their environment, not be adjusted to it, to be willing to stand alone, if necessary, for what is right and true.

Joel Henry Hildebrand

#2. Very few people do anything creative after the age of thirty-five. The reason is that very few people do anything creative before the age of thirty-five.

Joel Henry Hildebrand

#3. A child of the new generation Refused to learn multiplication. He said 'Don't conclude That I'm stupid or rude; I am simply without motivation.'

Joel Henry Hildebrand

#4. The invention of IQ did a great disservice to creativity in education ... Individuality, personality, originality, are too precious to be meddled with by amateur psychiatrists whose patterns for a "wholesome personality" are inevitably their own.

Joel Henry Hildebrand

#5. The best person able to appraise promise as a mathematician is a gifted teacher, and not a professional tester.

Joel Henry Hildebrand

#6. That there is no such thing as the scientific method, one might easily discover by asking several scientists to define it. One would find, I am sure, that no two of them would exactly agree. Indeed, no two scientists work and think in just the same ways.

Joel Henry Hildebrand

#7. The men who have had the most to give to their fellow men are those who have enriched their minds and hearts in solitude. It is a poor education that does not fit a man to be alone with himself.

Joel Henry Hildebrand

#8. [I shall not] discuss scientific method, but rather the methods of scientists. We proceed by common sense and ingenuity. There are no rules, only the principles of integrity and objectivity, with a complete rejection of all authority except that of fact.

Joel Henry Hildebrand

#9. How fortunate for civilization, that Beethoven, Michelangelo, Galileo and Faraday were not required by law to attend schools where their total personalities would have been operated upon to make them learn acceptable ways of participating as members of "the group."

Joel Henry Hildebrand