The value of students

I was watching a video of a that the great computer pioneer Ivan Sutherland gave just a week ago, at the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Computing at the University of Utah. Not surprisingly, he said many brilliant things.

But one moment of his talk in particular jumped out at me. It was when he said this:

“My opinion is, it’s harder to forget what you were taught than to learn new stuff. And that’s the value of students. They don’t know what can’t be done, and so they just go ahead and do it.”