 | Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences... - John Adams |
 | If I had any hope that in the foreseeable future, the educational system of this country could be so radically transformed that the basic liberal training would be adequately accomplished in the secondary [i.e., high] schools and that the Bachelor of Arts degree would then be awarded at the termination of such schooling, I would gladly recommend that the college be relieved of any further responsibility for training in the liberal arts... if we are going to have general human schooling in this country, it has to be accomplished in the first twelve years of compulsory schooling...it would be appropriate to award a bachelor of arts degree at the completion of such basic schooling. Doing so would return that degree to its original educational significance as certifying competence in the liberal arts, which are the arts or skills of learning in all fields of subject matter. - Mortimer Adler Reading the Great Books had done more for my mind than all the rest of the academic pursuits...it is the best education for the faculty as well as for the students; the use of original texts is an antidote for survey courses and fifth-rate textbooks; and it constitutes by itself, if properly conducted, the backbone of a liberal education. - Mortimer Adler In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. - Mortimer Adler The teacher, aware of the indispensable steps in the process by which he himself has moved his mind up the ladder of learning, devises ways to help another individual engage in a similar process; and he applies them with sensitivity to the state of that other person's mind and with awareness of whatever special difficulties the other must overcome in order to make headway. - Mortimer Adler |
| | We have adopted a false method of education. Slavery is not the best training for liberty. It is only by exercise that powers grow. To do things for people does not train them to do them for themselves. We are learning more and more in things educational that the first duty of the teacher is not to solve all difficulties for the pupil, and to present him with the ready-made answer, but to awaken a spirit, to teach the pupil to realize his own powers, by setting before him difficulties, and showing him how to approach and overcome them. - Roland Allen |
 | The measure of a man's education is that he takes pleasure in the exercise of his mind. - Jacques Barzun |
 | Some seek knowledge for
The sake of knowledge:
That is curiosity;
Others seek knowledge so that
They themselves may be known:
That is vanity;
But there are still others
Who seek knowledge in
Order to serve and edify others:
And that is charity.- Bernard of Clairveaux |
 
| The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity…is often untruthful. - G. K. Chesterton Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it. - G. K. Chesterton |
| I would suggest that loving God with our minds—thinking Christianly—points us to a unity of knowledge, a seamless whole, because all true knowledge flows from the One Creator to His one creation. Thus specific bodies of knowledge relate to each other not just because scholars work together in community, not just because interdisciplinary work broadens our knowledge, but because all truth is God's truth, composing a single universe of knowledge. - David Dockery |
 | [I am] more convinced than ever of the usefulness of free religious conversation. I find by conversing on natural philosophy, that I gain knowledge abundantly faster, and see the reasons of things much more clearly, than in private study: wherefore, earnestly to seek at all times for religious conversation; for those with whom I can at all times, with profit and delight, and with freedom, so converse. - Jonathan Edwards |
 | There never was a time when the reading public was so large, or so helplessly exposed to the influence of its own time. There never was a time when those who read at all, read so many more books by living authors than books by dead authors. There never was a time so completely parochial, so shut off from the past. - T. S. Eliot The purpose of a Christian education would not be merely to make men and women pious Christians: a system which aimed too rigidly at this end alone would become only obscurantist. A Christian education must primarily teach people to be able to think in Christian categories. - T. S. Eliot |
 | One of the reasons why mature people are apt to learn less than young people is that they are willing to risk less. Learning is a risky business, and they do not like failure. - John Gardner |
 | The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things - the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit. - Samuel Johnson |
 | Education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. … We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education. - Martin Luther King, Jr. |
 | Even if we were permitted to force a Christian curriculum on existing schools with the existing teachers, we should only be making masters hypocrites and hardening thereby the pupil's hearts. I am speaking, of course, of large schools on which a secular character is already stamped. If any man, in some little corner out of the reach of the omnicompotent, can make or preserve a really Christian school, that is another matter. His duty is plain. - C. S. Lewis The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head. - C. S. Lewis |
 | I advise no one to place a child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not increasingly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt. - Martin Luther |
 
| Far too often today children are taught, both in school and at home, to equate truth with fact. If we can't understand something and dissect it with our conscious minds, then it isn't true. In our anxiety to limit ourselves to that which we can comprehend definitively, we are losing all that is above, beyond, below, through, past, over that small area encompassed by our conscious minds. - Madeleine L'Engle We cannot Name or be Named without language. If our vocabulary dwindles to a few shopworn words, we are setting ourselves up for takeover by a dictator. When language becomes exhausted, our freedom dwindles - we cannot think; we do not recognize danger; injustice strikes us as no more than "the way things are." - Madeleine L'Engle |
| | We do all children a massive disservice when we "chew" over the material and "spit the pulp" out for them. People reject the secondhand results of someone else's efforts. No, let the children remember because they took it in themselves. Let them think their own thoughts about it. Let them respond in narration, with questions, with... ideas. -Susan Schaeffer Macaulay |
 | The real alternative is a faculty made up of great Christian thinkers who are great lovers of God with allegiance to the truth of God's Word and razor-sharp discernment of all the subtle idols of our age. What is needed is great teachers with great hearts for the great old verities of the faith--verities that they hold because there are great reasons for holding them--reasons that will stand up to hard questions. Faith is destroyed when little academic minds and little hearts for God niggle away at magnificent and precious realities with no remorse...when there is no great love for God and his Word and no great passion to see the truth of God magnified and defended with profound credibility and authenticity...when faculty demonstrate their academic standing not in the really great and difficult task of constructive explication and justification of truth, but in the simple and adolescent task of deconstruction and cynicism. Our problem is not that "indoctrination" is the only alternative to education. It isn't. Our problem is that so few people have ever tasted great Christian education or seen great Christian thinking going on from a profoundly God-centered perspective in an atmosphere where students can feel that the faculty would gladly die for Jesus. - John Piper |
 | One who hungers and thirsts after knowledge and is eager to learn what is not known, abandoning all other objects of care, is eager to become a disciple, and day and night watches at the doors and houses of those accounted wise. - Philo of Alexandria |
 | Bestow thy youth so that thou mayest have comfort to remember it when it hath forsaken thee, and not sigh and grieve at the account thereof. While thou art young thou wilt think it will never have an end; but the longest day hath its evening, and thou shalt enjoy it but once; it never turns again; use it therefore as the spring-time, which soon departeth, and wherein thou oughtest to plant and sow all provisions for a long and happy life. - Sir Walter Raleigh |
 | The entire object of true education is to make people not merely to do the right things, but to enjoy them; not merely industrious, but to love industry; not merely learned, but to love knowledge; not merely pure, but to love purity; not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice. - John Ruskin |
 | It was an idyllic, haphazard, humouristic existence, without fine imagination, without any familiar infusion of scholarship, without articulate religion: a flutter of intelligence in a void, flying into trivial play, in order to drop back, as soon as college days were over, into the drudgery of affairs. [Harvard students in the 1880s] George Santayana |
 
| Today we have a weakness in our education process in failing to understand the natural associations between the disciplines. We tend to study all our disciplines in unrelated parallel lines. This tends to be true in both Christian and secular education. This is one of the reasons why evangelical Christians have been taken by surprise at the tremendous shift that has come in our generation. - Francis A. Schaeffer True Christian education is not a negative thing; it is not a matter of isolating the student from the full scope of knowledge. Isolating the student from large sections of human knowledge is not the basis of a Christian education. Rather it is giving him or her the framework for total truth, rooted in the Creator's existence and in the Bible's teaching, so that in each step of the formal learning process the student will understand what is true and what is false and why it is true or false. It is not isolating students from human knowledge. It is giving the tools in the opening the doors to all human knowledge, in the Christian framework so they will know what is truth and what is untruth, so they can keep learning as long as they live, and they can enjoy, they can really enjoy, the whole wrestling through field after field of knowledge. That is what an educated person is. - Francis A. Schaeffer |
 
| It is now very difficult for the artist to speak the language of the theologian or the scientist the language of either. But the attempt must be made; and there are signs everywhere that the human mind is once more beginning to move toward a synthesis of experience. - Dorothy L. Sayers 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 a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects... We have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it. - Dorothy L. Sayers Is not the great defect of our education today... that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning. - Dorothy Sayers |
| Classical education, properly conducted, works on the principle of Indirection. What we achieve concretely is not as vital to our minds over the long haul as what we're given the power to achieve - on our own. That's what formation is all about. We gain independence. Much there is to be said for any curriculum that doesn't strive to give content so much as it does the tools of skill and judgment that allow us to get that content at our leisure. – Tracy Lee Simmons |
 | Could I climb to the highest place in Athens, I would lift my voice and proclaim, "Fellow citizens, why do you turn and scrape every stone to gather wealth and take so little care of your children to whom one day you must relinquish it all?" - Socrates |
 | Socrates sought to guide his student into authentic knowledge. He did it via a method of discreet, guided questioning. He engaged his student in deep dialogue [forcing] the student to think his way to a sound conclusion. Socrates wanted to teach his students to think. The goal of thinking is truth. With this method, knowledge is supported by understanding and the student goes beneath the surface to penetrate the truth of the matter. - R.C. Sproul |
 | I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. - John Steinbeck |
 
| In it [grade school] I learned that my being saved from sin and my belonging to God made a difference for all that I knew or did. I saw the power of God in nature and His providence in the course of history. That gave the proper setting for my salvation, which I had in Christ. In short, the whole wide world that gradually opened up for me through my schooling was regarded as operating in its every aspect under the direction of the all-powerful and all-wise God whose child I was through Christ. I was to learn to think God's thoughts after him in every field of endeavor. - Cornelius Van Til We need men and women on our teaching staffs that are intelligently unafraid. We need men and women on our teaching staffs who are confident of their own regeneration, who gladly work for the realization of an ideal that the world ridicules. We need men and women on our teaching staffs who understand the Christian philosophy of education, and also the anti-Christian philosophy of education that controls the pedagogy of our day. Such teachers will have the power of discrimination that is so all-important for their task. - Cornelius Van Til It is in the educational field that the struggle for or against God is being decided today. Teachers fight on the most dangerous sector of the front. - Cornelius Van Til |
 | ... if the claim of the modern to know more is correct, our criticism falls to the ground, for it is hardly to be imagined that a people who have been gaining in knowledge over the centuries have chosen an evil course. Naturally everything depends on what we mean by knowledge. I shall adhere to the classic proposition that there is no knowledge at the level of sensation, that therefore knowledge is of universals... The process of learning involves interpretation, and the fewer particulars we require in order to arrive at our generalization, the more apt pupils we are in the school of wisdom. - Richard Weaver |
 | Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. - H.G. Wells |
 | If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving that upon tablets which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity." - Daniel Webster |
 | Jesus' aim in utilizing logic is not to win battles, but to achieve understanding or insight in his hearers... That is, he does not try to make everything so explicit that the conclusion is forced down the throat of the hearer. Rather, he presents matters in such a way that those who wish to know can find their way to, can come to, the appropriate conclusion as something they have discovered--whether or not it is something they particularly care for. - Dallas Willard |
