“Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.”

“Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.”

“If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old.”

“The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.”

“Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise.”

“Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.”

“Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.”