He is quite correct. We undervalue ignorance, we undervalue learning, we undervalue the asking of questions.

Teachers don't help, and as a former teacher I am (was?) as guilty of this as anyone. One of my specialist areas was teaching mathematics. I once asked a year 11 student if he thought all the answers in mathematics were known. He answered "yes", and that confirmed my worst fear about teaching the subject. It is trivial to understand why he answered "yes": it is because teachers only ever give their students problems to which the answers are already known or findable using a very limited range of methods. In Stuart Firestein's model, these are mere facts, and the existence of the number of university departments of mathematics shows that research into mathematics is still very much a major human activity.

He gave the audience some laugh lines. If he'd gotten to his final line -- "Let's get out the matches" -- more quickly, he could have been specific about what to do with the matches.