This dearth should not surprise us. Hardly anyone has been encouraged, much less trained, to think for themselves, and their teachers and parents and bosses weren't either. And neither were theirs. (We may have learned to revere thinkers like Socrates, but we also learned that the state poisoned him for thinking for himself: not unmitigated encouragement.) 6 Occasionally, however, we do have a teacher or mentor who truly wants us to develop our own thinking. They give us glimpses. When I was 13 years old, I was put into an advanced algebra course. On the first day the teacher, who was maligned by students as a hard teacher because she tried to get them to think, stood in front of the blackboard and said, "On the paper in front of you write the sum of a number." Question: Who first made the writer realize that thinking for oneself is important?