The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency–the belief that the here and now is all there is.
~ Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind
The parents must have knowledge of what has happened in the past, and prescriptions for what ought to be, in order to resist the philistinism or the wickedness of the present.
~ Allan Bloom, in Closing of the American Mind, page 57
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.
~ Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1987), page 25
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They know enough who know how to learn.
~ Henry Adams
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
~ Aristotle
On one occasion Aristotle was asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated. “As much,” said he, “as the living are to the dead.”
~ Diogenes Laertius, in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
Rhetoric completes the tools of learning. Dialectic zeros in on the logic of things, of particular systems of thought or subjects. Rhetoric takes the next grand step and brings all these subjects together into one whole.
~ William Blake
The plain, unvarnished truth is that public education is a shoddy, fraudulent piece of goods sold t to the public at an astronomical price. It’s time the American consumer knew the extent of the fraud which is victimizing millions of children each year.
~ Samuel Blumenfeld, in NEA: Trojan Horse In American Education [Boise, Idaho: Paradigm, 1984] page xiv
Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.
~ Daniel J. Boorstin
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
~ Alec Bourne
To have people who are well informed but not constrained by conscience is conceivably, the most dangerous outcome of education possible. Indeed it could be argued that ignorance is better than unguided intelligence, for the most dangerous people are those who have knowledge without a moral framework.
~ Ernest Boyer, in “The Third Wave of School Reform”, Christianity Today , 9/22/89, p. 16
That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call tragedy.
~ Thomas Carlyle
The instructor has to teach history, cosmogony, psychology, ethics, the laws of nations. How can he do it without saying anything favorable or unfavorable about the beliefs of evangelical Christians, Catholics, Socinians, Deists, pantheists, materialists, or fetish worshipers, who all claim equal rights under American institutions? His teaching will indeed be “the play of Hamlet, with the part of Hamlet omitted.”
~ R. L. Dabney, in On Secular Education
Every line of true knowledge must find its completeness as it converges on God, just as every beam of daylight leads the eye to the sun. If religion is excluded from our study, every process of thought will be arrested before it reaches its proper goal. The structure of thought must remain a truncated cone, with its proper apex lacking.
~ R. L. Dabney, in On Secular Education. Moscow, ID: Ransom Press, 1989. pages 16-17.
There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried.
~ John Dewey
Those who trust us educate us.
~ George Eliot
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
~ Epictetus, in Discourses
Perhaps the number one problem in public education is the attempt to educate students without a moral point of reference. With a floating target of truth and the desertion of absolutes, the entire system has abandoned its base.
~Kenneth Gangel, in Schooling Choices, edited by Wayne House. Portland, OR: Multnomah, 1988. page 127.
We have too readily blamed shortcomings in American education on social changes (the disorientation of the American family or the impact of television) or incompetent teachers or structural flaws in our schools systems. But the chief blame should fall on faulty theories promulgated in our schools of education and accepted by educational policymakers.
~ E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987.
Schools have, or should have, children for six or seven hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for thirteen years or more. To assert that they are powerless to make a significant impact on what their students learn would be to make a claim about American education that few parents, teachers, or students would find it easy to accept.
~ E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know
A man’s mind stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the things you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned.
~ Thomas H. Huxley
Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
~ William James
A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearing of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part but all, of the curriculum of the school.
~ J. Gresham Machen, in Education, Christianity, and the State
The most important Christian Education institution is not the pulpit or the school, important as those institutions are; but it is the Christian family. And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work.
~ J. Gresham Machen, in Education, Christianity, and the State. Jefferson, MD: Trinity Foundation, 1987. page 8
I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the office, both private and public, of peace and war.
~ John Milton, in Areopagitica and Of Education. Northbrook, IL: AHM Publishing, 1951. page 60
Educationists are entertaining. We can always find a good laugh in their prose, with its special, ludicrous combination of ignorance and pretentiousness.
~Richard Mitchell, in The Graves of Academe
If you want to predict the future of our land, go to school and look around.
~Richard Mitchell, in The Graves of Academe
I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
~ Wilson Mizner
Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.
~ Claus Moser
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.
~ Report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983
People enter schools as question-marks and they leave as periods.
~ Neil Postman
Education is the most powerful ally of humanism, and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?
~ Charles Potter
The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin.
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Most people would rather die than think — in fact they do!
~ Bertrand Russell
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.
~ Dorothy Sayers, from “The Lost Tools of Learning” in Douglas Wilson’s book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Education. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1991.
There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or other, been taught. Even if we learned nothing–perhaps in particular if we learned nothing–our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value.
~ Dorothy Sayers, from “The Lost Tools of Learning” in Douglas Wilson’s book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Education. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1991. page 145.
A man cannot leave a better legacy to the world than a well-educated family.
~ Thomas Scott
We’re drowning in information, but we’re starved for knowledge.
~ Unknown
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Related
- The Duties of Parents, by J.C. Ryle
- An Education at Borders Books
- Homeschooling Responsible for 9/11 Destruction
- Crash Course in Classroom Collectivism
- Master List of Great Quotes
I have recently been blogging about various distance learning opportunities. Technology is changing the way that we work, communicate, entertain ourselves, and even pedagogy. Teacher Training is available online, employing a variety of media formats and from accredited institutions. If you are a K-12 teacher looking for strategies and skills to enhance your instruction, or if you need additional credentials to advance your career, you owe it to yourself to explore what distance learning opportunities are available to you. Graduate level courses in classroom management, assertive discipline and scores of other topics are available through an alliance of partnering universities. Check it out.
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I spent yesterday in sixth-grade classrooms. It was “Parent Day” at my son’s school.
Here are a few observations coming out of that experience:
1. Other than my son, there are only five Caucasians in his class of 24 students. The number of Hispanic and African American students far outnumbered Caucasian students and there were several Asian students, also. I see this ethnic and racial diversity as a positive for my son. However, I was surprised that there were not more white students in his class (and from what I observed in his entire school). Where were they? We live in an upper-middle class suburb and I would have expected more Caucasian students.
2. I now know why my son brings home so much homework from school. The teachers spent at least one-third of their time trying to get control of the classroom (and they weren’t very successful). If they were able to use the time effectively that is instead used to try to get students into their seats, to remain quiet, and listen then there would be plenty of time to do the work that my son is required to bring home. Maybe it is time for the school to put the seats back into rows rather than being configured in work groups and send kids that don’t want to learn out of the room.
3. I was thoroughly impressed with the instructional tools that were made available in the classroom — high-tech, high quality. And, I love the design and quality of the books used. If I would have had textbooks like those my son has I would have devoured them. I see this and then I think of the homeschooling moms and dads who can’t afford these gadgets and texts but still manage to equip their children to score far better on standardized tests than the kids coming out of my son’s Intermediate School. Hmmmm. Yet, all year long the school has been advocating for higher taxes to get more money for the school. The argument is that they need better stuff to better educate the kids. Hmmmm. Something’s not right here.
Well, those are just some generic observations. I’m glad the school invited us parents into the classroom yesterday. I hope they do it again.
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Related Content
- Parenting – Select Quotes
- What does a healthy, wholesome relationship with kids look like?
- I Wish I Was A Better Father
- Traveling With Children
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Sunday School was originally established as a place for poor children to learn to read.
Only the educated are free.
~ in Discourses
To accuse others for one’s own misfortune is a sign of want of education; to accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun; to accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.
~ in The Encheiridion
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
~ in Discourses
Keep before your eyes from day to day death and exile and all things that seem terrible, but death most of all, and then you will never set your thoughts on what is low and will never desire anything beyond measure.
~ in The Encheiridion
Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.
~ Epictetus, in Discourses
If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.
No great thing is created suddenly.
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My son has been having some difficulty with math. Maybe I need to become a rapper in order to help him with it…
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the things you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned.
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
When I was doing corporate training it was common for us to keep a bag of candy close by to throw at trainees from time to time.
“Good answer. Have a Hershey’s Kiss.” Toss, catch, unwrap, eat. It broke any monotony and kept trainees on their toes.
I have been thinking about how I can implement a similar training/educational scenario for the students in the college classes I teach. My classes are rather large with 60-75 students so I think I am going to have to modify my approach. Rather than a sack of candy, I think I am going to invest in a paintball gun.
“Smith, John Q., what did Aristotle have to say about Plato’s metaphysical dualism?”
The room grows silent as student Smith, John Q. considers his response. His pause extends a little too long. It is apparent that he has not read pages 66-87 of A.H. Armstrong’s An Introduction To Ancient Philosophy. So, I deftly reach into my briefcase, pull my new 08 Spyder MR2 to my shoulder, and squeeze the trigger.
Thwap! Thwap! Thwap! Three paintballs slap into the chest of student Smith, John Q. The monotony is broken, and there is plenty of incentive for students to do their assigned reading prior to the next class session.
Pedagogy at its best!
I read with interest the Christianity Today interview with the new president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Dennis Hollinger. There was one particular response which caused me to raise my eyebrows. When asked about inerrancy at Gordon-Conwell, Hollinger completely avoided the question by talking about proper interpretive practice. When someone avoids a question such as this they need to be pressed on it further. There is no one of any theological stripe that would disagree with what Hollinger said about understanding the genre of revelation, so why say it? I have to wonder what he is hiding? I don’t want to be suspicious, but his answer with a non-answer approach makes me wonder.
Here is the question and answer. Am I reading too much into this?
