I Heart Feynman

I can't believe I've never posted this before. Anyway, the transcript below matches the video starting at about 9:08 (emphasis mine).

My cousin at that time, who was 3 [sic?] years old and was in high school and was having considerable difficulty with his algebra, and had a tutor-chem. And, I was allowed to sit in the corner while the tutor would try to teach my cousin algebra. And, so problems like 2x plus--I said to my cousin there, I said, "What are you trying to do?" You know, I hear him talking about x.

He said, "Well, you know, 2x + 7 is equal to 15, he says. And you're trying to find out what x is." I says, "You mean 4." He says, "Yeah, but you did it with arithmetic; you have to do it by algebra."

And that's why my cousin was never able to do algebra, because he didn't understand how he was supposed to do it. There was no way—I learned algebra fortunately by not going to school, by knowing the whole idea was to find out what x was, and it didn't make any difference how you did it. There's no such a thing as, you know, "do it by arithmetic," you "do it by algebra."

That was a false thing that they had invented in school, so that the children who have to study algebra can all pass it. They had invented a set of rules, which if you followed them without thinking, could produce the answer. Subtract 7 from both sides. If you have a multiplier, divide both sides by the multiplier, and so on. A series of steps, by which you could get the answer if you didn't understand what you were trying to do.