Albert Einstein, scientist: “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school”

Few things are repeated more often in a classroom than teachers telling students not to cram at the last minute. This habit, often driven as much by heavy workloads as by poor study habits, though students do bear some responsibility, seems to run up against a surprising opponent: Albert Einstein.

“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school,” Einstein said, expressing a deeply critical view of traditional academic instruction. He believed that, rather than focusing on facts that could easily be forgotten, it was far more valuable to spend time training the mind to think.

From that perspective, people could develop a stronger ability to reason, question the world around them, and analyze problems. “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” Einstein also said, a statement that carries a great deal of truth: knowledge has limits and can be exhausted, while imagination is boundless.

Schools in Einstein’s time were so rigid in their methods that he ultimately became deeply dissatisfied with them. In an environment where discipline was treated as the highest priority, the scientist rejected the idea that education should teach obedience and instead argued that it should teach independent thought.

As a result, even though Einstein was a brilliant student, he was not an easy one for his teachers. His resistance to the system led many to predict academic failure. As history makes clear, that prediction never came true. His extraordinary intellect ultimately established him as one of the greatest geniuses in human history.

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