He knows everything but he lacks inexperience. - Howard Gardner

The biggest mistake of past centuries in teaching has been to treat all children as if they were variants of the same individual, and thus to feel justified in teaching them the same subjects in the same ways.

"Einstein felt that he did not have great mathematical gifts and deliberately chose not to take courses and to continue in that area.

The fact that I neglected mathematics to a certain extent had its causes not merely in my stronger interest in science than in mathematics but also in the following strange experience....I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous specialties, each of which could easily absorb the short lifetime granted to us....In physics, however, I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential.

This capacity to pick out important issues dovetailed with Einstein's search for the most general possible conception. "In a man of my type," he declared, "the turning point of the development lies in the fact that gradually the major interest disengages itself to a far reaching degree from the momentary and the merely personal and turns toward the striving for a mental grasp of things.

Both science and history are moving targets. Scholars in the twenty-first century are much more aware than those of earlier generations that scientists operate under the influence of powerful metaphors (science as exploration, discovery, documentation, thrust and counterthrust), and that both the scope and the tools of history undergo continual changes.