Neil deGrasse Tyson
American astrophysicist, science communicator, Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and since 2006 host at PBS's educational television show NOVA scienceNOW.
During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their "low contracted prejudices." And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective.
Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.
If you ask adults how many teachers — out of the scores in elementary, middle school, high school, college and graduate school — made a singular impression on who and what they are, it's never more than three or four teachers. Everybody else is a distant second to this set.
Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of the kids. They out-number kids. They vote. They wield resources. That's why my public focus is primarily adults.
There are people who say “I'll never need this math -- these trig identities from 10th grade or 11th grade.” Or maybe you never learned them. Here's the catch: whether or not you ever use the math that you learned in school, the act of having learned the math established a wiring in your brain that didn't exist before, and it's the wiring in your brain that makes you the problem solver.
People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.