EDUCATION QUOTES
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.
Roland Allen:
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.
Jacques Barzun:
The measure of a man's education is that he takes pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
Bernard of Clairveaux:
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.
Allan Bloom:
Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.
G. K. Chesterton:
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.
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.
David Dockery:
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.
Jonathan Edwards:
[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.
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.
Gallup Poll, 1990:
We are having a revival of feelings but not of the knowledge of God. The church today is more guided by feelings than by convictions. We value enthusiasm more than informed commitment.
John Gardner:
We don't even know what skills may be needed in the years ahead... We must train our young people in the fundamental fields of knowledge, and equip them to understand and cope with change... We must give them the critical qualities of mind and durable qualities of character that will serve them in circumstances we cannot now even predict.
Mark Hopkins:
We are to regard the mind, not as a piece of iron to be laid upon the anvil and hammered into any shape, nor as a block of marble in which we are to find the statue by removing the rubbish, nor as a receptacle into which knowledge may be poured; but as a flame that is to be fed, as an active being that must be strengthened to think and to feel -- and to dare, to do, and to suffer.
Martin Luther King, Jr.:
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.
Leonardo Da Vinci:
As iron rusts when not used, and water gets foul from standing or turns to ice when exposed to cold, so the intellect degenerates without exercise.
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.
Madeleine L'Engle:
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. -
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."
Montaigne:
Teaching must be the development of natural inclinations for which purpose the tutor must watch his pupil and listen to him, not continually bawl words into his ears as if pouring water into a funnel. Good teaching will come from a mind well-made rather than well-filled.
Philo of Alexander:
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.
Sir Walter Raleigh:
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.
John Ruskin:
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.
Francis Schaeffer:
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.
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.
Dorothy Sayers:
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.
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.
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.
Socrates:
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?"
R. C. Sproul:
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.
Cornelius Van Til:
In [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.
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.
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.
H. G. Wells:
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
Daniel Webster:
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.
Dallas Willard:
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.
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