Learning with Albert Einstein

Two months ago I referred to the quote on my website homepage: “Once you stop learning, you start dying” (see Question Everything). Websites such as Goodreads and Quotefancy, claim that this was said or written by Albert Einstein. I’ve found no evidence that this is true and anyone else on the internet who has used it, seems unable or disinterested in providing a reference.

I’m further dubious of its veracity as The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, a book edited by Alice Calaprice through Princeton University Press in 2011, makes no reference to the quote. Calaprice’s text records over 1600 of Einstein’s best sentences and, for each, offers a citation. The nearest that I have found was quoted in 2007 by Denis Hayes, taken from a 1931 article that Einstein wrote entitled ‘The World as I see it’. Here, he stated that:

‘The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead and his eyes are dimmed’

Einstein, 1931, p. 194 in Hayes, 2007, pp. 144-5

In essence, Einstein is saying something similar here, that experiencing the ‘mysterious’ brings a person alive. Nonetheless, it is not quite the same as the quote. Einstein is not talking about learning here, as such, but about experiencing and engaging with the unknown. Unless anyone can tell me otherwise, I consider the attribution to be inaccurate at best.

Nonetheless, I liked the quote enough to keep it as it’s a short and pithy way of saying that learning should be a life-long pursuit that enables each one of us to grow and improve ourselves (which is exactly the message that I want to convey). It seems, also that this fits with Einstein’s view of learning.

That is the topic for this short article; what did Einstein actually think about the purpose of learning, and did he leave us any clues to those views?  

As it happens, Einstein left us lots of clues, and scholars have written extensively on this very subject. I’m going to start with The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, as it is here that we find some of Einstein’s own words on the subject. I will then delve deeper by looking at what scholars say about what Einstein thought, and we’ll see where we end up.

So, what did Einstein tell us about the topic of learning? First, in response to Thomas Edison arguing that a college education is useless, Einstein replied in 1921 that:

“It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”

Calaprice, 100 – taken from Frank Einstein: His Life and Times, p. 185

Here Einstein describes two types of learning. The first is the digestion of information and facts through books. Today, we might also include the internet. Second, a deeper type of learning that looks to ‘train the mind to think’. Einstein separates the learning of information from the need to train the mind. This is an important distinction, which still resonates today, and informs Einstein’s other musings about learning.

Almost two decades later Einstein reflected on his childhood and recognised the fact that he sometimes struggled to learn until he found a reason to do so, or, more precisely, something that enabled him to find a passion for the subject. In this quote from a draft letter that Einstein wrote to the physicist, mathematician, and philosopher, Philipp Frank in 1940, he stated that:

“I took violin lessons from age 6 to 14, but had no luck with my teachers, for whom music did not transcend mechanical practicing. I really began to learn only when I was about 13 years old, mainly after I had fallen in love with Mozart’s sonatas.”

In draft of letter to Philipp Frank, 1940. Einstein Archives 71-191. [Calaprice, 239]

This quote is interesting as Einstein suggests that the problem was in the way he was taught not in his ability to learn music itself. He uses the term ‘mechanical practicing’ to denote a method of teaching by rote. What Einstein needed was something more contextual to engage him in the creativity and beauty of music before his mind (and heart) would engage with what he was being taught.

In 1933, Einstein had expressed a similar opinion in The Dink, a publication for Princeton University students.  

“Never regard your study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn the liberating beauty of the intellect for your own personal joy and for the profit of the community to which your later work will belong.”

From a statement given to the Princeton University freshman publication, The Dink, December 1933. Einstein Archives 28-257. [Calaprice, 103]

To learn, therefore, is to engage in the learning with joy. It should be a fun experience, which feeds the intellect. It should not be passive or ‘mechanical’, as Einstein rejected years later when he reflected on his childhood music teacher. Learning should also be about more than facts – that’s what he said in 1921 to Thomas Edison. Taken in context with these other quotes, we can see that Einstein believed that intellectual pursuits were a route to a better and more impactful life and that learning could only happen when both brain and heart were fully engaged in the process. 

The short article by Andrew K. Yoder supports such a conclusion. He wrote that Einstein ‘sees the purely rationalistic approach to the purposes of education as limited to the extent that it fails to provide a teleology for human aspiration’. In other words, Einstein rejected the notion that education is primarily about instilling knowledge into as many students as possible, but about instilling a sense of purpose to that knowledge.

Yoder explained that education, for Einstein, was about infusing a sense of social duty and aspiration in the young, which could be used for the betterment of society. In doing so, Einstein saw the risk that schools might churn out carbon-copies of perfect citizens which would be, as Yoder puts it, ‘a mere tool in society’. Independent thinking directed towards improving society was crucial. It is, perhaps, important to note that Denis Hayes sees similar issues with modern teaching practices. Education is still driven by a strict curriculum in which creativity is often the slave to national test scores.

Joe L. Kincheloe et al., have argued that Einstein considered good education to be one in which students could question established orthodoxy and that educators should facilitate this questioning. Such an approach went against the main aims of educational institutions which were (and often continue to be) bastions of teaching orthodoxy to turn out model citizens.

Conclusions

Albert Einstein was a ‘genius’ and as such he was often considered unorthodox and troublesome. He did not get on with school because their mission was not to encourage unfettered thinking but to embed knowledge that society deemed acceptable and useful. The articles by Kincheloe (et al.) and Hayes both demonstrate unease at modern-day educational institutions in terms that echo Einstein’s views. So, the question emerges from this brief discussion: what is education for, what is its purpose, and does it conflict with our innate creativity and curiosity, which is a gift each and every human has? This is an interesting set of questions, which require much more thought.

I started this article by looking at a fabricated quote that didn’t belong to Einstein (although he did write something similar), and now, at the other end, I realise that Einstein is talking about the same things as I will be on this website. It’s nice to be in good company! Einstein talked about how amazing learning about new things can be, especially if you have learned the right skills, and come to it with both your mind and your heart engaged. But he also challenges us to ask questions against accepted norms, to think outside of the box, and to question whether education is the ultimate platform for learning or if, sometimes, we need to explore beyond the confines of orthodoxy and find our own pathway to wisdom.    

What do you think? Does anything that Einstein wrote about learning resonate with you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Sources

Hayes, Denis, ‘What Einstein can teach us about education’, Education 3-13: International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early Years Education, 35:2 (2007), pp. 143-154. DOI: 10.1080/03004270701311986.

Kincheloe, Joe. L., Shirley R. Steinberg, and Deborah J. Tippins, ‘Einstein’s Lessons for Learners’, Counterpoints – The Stigma of Genius: Einstein, Consciousness and Education (1999), pp. 1-26. 

Yoder, Andrew K., ‘Einstein and Education’, Educational Theory, 18:1 (1968), pp. 73-76. DOI: 10.111/j.1741-5446.1968.tb00336.x.