Quote of the Week...from Albert Einstein

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.  ---Albert Einstein.

The great physicist Albert Einstein lived from 1879 to 1955...I don't know when he made the above statement, but even if it was during his last days on earth, it now seems just a little bit antiquated. For the idea of life-long learning has caught on, at least in Western society, as life expectancy has increased and people often find themselves in old age with reasonably good health and plenty of time to pursue their interests. A more traditional view on the subject of education has it confined to school...from kindergarten on through college...and then it's on to the "work years" and forget about all that learning stuff.  But Einstein not only promoted deliberately growing intellectually long after school is over, but also said that it starts in infancy, long before formal education begins.  My parents were strong advocates of informal preschool education, and my sister Anita and I both were reading well before starting school.  I have always separated in my mind the ideas of going to school and learning...the former is bounded by time, place, and curriculum while the latter is much vaster and penetrates every area of my life and the reality around me.  Very often, as a matter of fact, I felt when a student back then that I'd rather be learning other things from what was in the official program of study.  And now we have such ready access to information and educational resources through the Internet that anyone with that access can truly grow intellectually on a scale that Professor Einstein in his day could not have imagined...and that dude's imagination was something other-worldly...