CONVENTIONAL MEDIOCRITY

"I am afraid that education is conceived more in terms of indoctrination by most school officials than in terms of enlightenment. My own belief is that education must be subversive if it is to be meaningful. By this I mean that it must challenge all the things we take for granted, examine all accepted assumptions, tamper with every sacred cow, and instill a desire to question and doubt. Without this the mere instruction to memorise data is empty. The attempt to enforce conventional mediocrity on the young is criminal."

Bertrand Russell

A GOOD WORLD

"We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world — its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties and its ugliness. See the world as it is and not be afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely being slavishly subdued by the terror which comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in Church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human-beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world and if it is not as good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages."

"A good world needs knowledge, kindness and courage, it does not need regretful hankering after the past or fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by the ignorant. It needs a fearless outlook and free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create."

Bertrand Russell

"I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true."

Bertrand Russell

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