The Ecology of Human Development Quotes

“If the children and youth of a nation are afforded opportunity to develop their capacities to the fullest, if they are given the k nowledge to understand the world and the wisdom to change it, then the prospects for the future are bright. In contrast, a society which neglects its children, however well it may function in other respects, risks eventual disorganization and demise.”
― Urie Bromfenbrennner, The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design

“Goethe, who commented wisely on so many aspects of human experience, said of our attempts to understand the world:

Everything has been thought of before,
The difficulty is to think of it again.

To this I would add (supposing that Goethe also said something to this effect, but not having discovered his discovery) that ideas are only as important as what you can do with them. Democrites supposed that the world was made up of atomic particles. Aside from his error in overlooking the implications of assuming that all atoms move in the same direction at the same rate, his astute guess about the atomic structure of matter did not have the same impact as Rutherford's rediscovery (with cloud chamber in hand) in 1900. In short, an idea is as powerful as what you can do with it.”
― Urie Bronfenbrenner, The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design