Aristotle

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Aristotle

• We are what we repeatedly do.
• Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

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• Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
  every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense,
  a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
  those who are cold and are not clothed
• The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this a
  modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
• It is two electric power plants, each serving a
  town of 60,000 population.
• It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals
• We pay for a single fighter plane with a half
  million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single
  destroyer with new homes that could have housed
  8,000 people.
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• Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 1953, about three
  months after his inauguration as the 34th
  president of the U.S. (International Herald
  Tribune, June 7, 2004, referenced in an editorial
  by his son, John S.D. Eisenhower).

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Sitting Bull
What treaty that the white have kept has the red
man broken? Not One!  What treaty that the
whites ever made with us red men have they kept?
Not one.   When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the
world. The sun rose and set on our lands. We
sent ten thousand horsemen into battle. Where
are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where
are our lands? Who owns them?   What white man
can say I ever stole his land or a penny of his
money? And yet they say I am a thief. Is it
wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked of me
because my skin is red? Because I am a Sioux?
Because I was born where my fathers lived?
Because I would die for my people and my
country?  
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Comenius, 17th Century Educator and Education
Critic

• School is the slaughterhouse of the mind.

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William Butler Yeats, English Poet

• School is not the filling of a pail. It is the
  lighting of a fire.

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Whitehead, The Aims of Education

• The result of teaching small parts of a large
  number of subjects is the passive reception of
  disconnected ideas, not illuminated with any
  spark of vitality. Let the main ideas which are
  introduced into a childs education be few and
  important, and let them be thrown into every
  combination possible. The child should make them
  his own, and should understand their application
  here and now in the circumstances of his actual
  life. From the very beginning of his education,
  the child should experience the joy of discovery.
  The discovery which he has to make is that
  general ideas give an understanding of that
  stream of events which pours through his life.

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George Amberson

• He had learned how to pass examinations by
  cramming that is, in three or four days and
  nights he could get into his head enough of a
  selected fragment of some scientific or
  philosophical or literary or linguistic subject
  to reply plausibly to six questions out of ten.
  He could retain the information necessary for
  such a feat just long enough to give a successful
  performance then it would evaporate utterly from
  his brain, and leave him undisturbed.
• What George Amberson had learned in college,
  From the Magnificant Ambersons by Booth
  Tarkington (1918)

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On the Effect of Cramming on Students, Anthony
Trollop

• I know well what such students are, and I know
  the evil that is done to them by the cramming
  they endure. They learn many names of
  things---high-sounding namesIt is a knowledge
  that requires no experience and very little real
  thought. But it demands much memory and after
  they have loaded themselves in this way, they
  think that they are instructed in all things.
  After all, what can they do that is of real use?
  What can they create?

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Robert Reich, former secretary of labor under
Bill Clinton

• Reich identifies four components of the kind of
  thinking that highly paid workers will
  increasingly need to master
• Command of abstractions
• Ability to think within systems
• Ability to evaluate ideas
• Ability to communicate effectively

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Donald Kennedy, Past president of Stanford, in a
letter sent to 3000 college and university
presidents.

• It simply will not do for our schools to produce
  a small elite to power our scientific
  establishment and a larger cadre of workers with
  basic skills to do routine work. Millions of
  people around the world now have these same basic
  skills and are willing to work twice as long for
  as little as 1/10th our basic wagesWe must
  develop a leading-edge economy based on workers
  who can think for a living. If skills are equal,
  in the long run wage will be too. This means we
  have to educate a vast mass of people capable of
  thinking critically, creatively, and
  imaginatively.

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H. L. Menchen on Liberty

• I believe in liberty. And when I say liberty, I
  mean the thing in its widest imaginable
  sense---liberty up to the extreme limits of the
  feasible and tolerable. I am against forbidding
  anybody to do anything, or say anything, or think
  anything so long as it is at all possible to
  imagine a habitable world in which he would be
  free to do, say, and think it. The burden of
  proof, as I see it, is always upon the policeman,
  which is to say, upon the lawmaker, the
  theologian, the right-thinker. He must prove his
  case doubly, triply, quadruply, and then he must
  start all over and prove it again. The eye
  through which I view him is watery and jaundiced.
  I do not pretend to be just to him---any more
  than a Christian pretends to be just to the
  devil. He is the enemy of everything I admire
  and respect in this world---of everything that
  makes it various and amusing and charming. He
  impedes every honest search for the truth. He
  stands against every sort of good-will and common
  decency. His ideal is that of an animal trainer,
  an archbishop, a major general in the army. I am
  against him until the last galoots ashore.

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John Henry NewmanThe Idea of a University1852

• Truth, of whatever kind, is the proper object of
  the intellect its cultivation then lies in
  fitting it to apprehend and contemplate truth...
  the intellect in its present state, ...does not
  discern truth intuitively, or as a whole. We
  know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a
  glance, but, as it were, by piecemeal and
  accumulation, by a mental process, by going round
  an object, by the comparison, the combination,
  the mutual correction, the continual adaptation,
  of many partial notions, by the employment,
  concentration, and joint action of many faculties
  and exercises of mind.

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• Such a union and concert of the intellectual
  powers, such an enlargement and development, such
  a comprehensiveness, is necessarily a matter of
  training. And again, such a training is a matter
  of rule it is not mere application, however
  exemplary, which introduces the mind to truth,
  nor the reading of many books, nor the getting up
  of many subjects, nor the witnessing many
  experiments, nor attending many lectures.

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• All this is short of enough a man may have done
  it all, yet be lingering in the vestibule of
  knowledge-he may not realize what his mouth
  utters he may not see with his mental eye what
  confronts him he may have no grasp of things as
  they are or at least he may have no power at all
  of advancing one step forward of himself, in
  consequence of what he has already acquired, no
  power of discriminating between truth and
  falsehood, of sifting out the grains of truth
  from the mass, of arranging things according the
  their real value.

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• Such a power is an acquired faculty of judgment,
  of clearsightedness, of sagacity, of wisdom,
  ...and of intellectual self-possession and repose
  - qualities which do not come of mere
  acquirement. The eye of the mind, of which the
  object is truth, is the work of discipline and
  habit.

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John Henry NewmanThe Idea of a University1852

• The intellect, which has been disciplined to the
  perfection of its powers, which knows and thinks
  while it knows, which has learned to leaven the
  dense mass of facts and events with the elastic
  force of reason, such an intellect cannot be
  partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be
  impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be
  patient, collected, and majestically calm,
  because it discerns the end in every beginning,
  the origin in every end, ...the limit in each
  delay because it ever knows where it stands, and
  how its path lies from one point to another.

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John Henry NewmanThe Idea of a University1852

• It is education which gives a man a clear
  conscious view of his own opinions and judgments,
  a truth in developing them, an eloquence in
  expressing them, and a force in urging them. It
  teaches him to see things as they are, to go
  right to the point, to disentangle a skein of
  thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to
  discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to
  master any subject with facility.

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• It shows him how to accommodate himself to
  others, how to throw himself into their state of
  mind, how to bring before them his own, how to
  influence them, how to come to an understanding
  with them, how to bear with them...he can ask a
  question pertinently, and gain a lesson
  seasonably, when he has nothing to impart
  himself...He has the repose of mind which lives
  in itself while it lives in the world...The art
  which tends to make a man all this, is in the
  object which it pursues as useful as the art of
  wealth or the art of health, though it is less
  susceptible as a method, and less tangible, less
  certain, less complete in its result.

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William Graham SumnerA Founding Father of
Sociology

• That we are good and others are bad is never true

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William Graham Sumner

• People educated in it critical habit of thought
  cannot be stampeded by stump orators and are
  never deceived by oratory. They are slow to
  believe. They can hold things as possible or
  probable in all degrees. They can wait for
  evidence and weigh evidence, uninfluenced by the
  emphasis and confidence with which assertions are
  made on one side or the other. (Folkways, 1906)

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John Henry Newman

• knowledge is not a mere extrinsic or accidental
  advantage,which may be got up from a book for
  the occasion,it is something intellectualmaking
  the objects of our knowledge subjectively our
  own. (Idea of A University, 1852).

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John Stuart Mill

• since the general or prevailing opinion on any
  object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is
  only by the collision of adverse opinions that
  the remainder of the truth has any chance of
  being supplied. (On Liberty, 1859)

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The Lesson by an anonymous author

• Then Jesus took his disciplines up the mountain
  and, gathering then around him, he taught them
  saying

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• Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the
  Kingdom of Heaven.
• Blessed are the meek.
• Blessed are they that mourn.
• Blessed are they who thirst for justice.
• Blessed are you when persecuted.
• Blessed are you when you suffer.
• Be glad and rejoice for your reward is great in
  heaven

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• Then Simon Peter said Do we have to write this
  down?
• And Andrew said, Are we supposed to know this?
• And James said, Will this be on the test?
• And Phillip said, What if we dont remember
  this?
• And John said, The other disciplines didnt have
  to learn this.
• And Matthew said, When do we get out of here?
• And Judas said, What does this have to do with
  the real world?

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• Then one of the Pharisees present asked to see
  Jesus lesson plan and inquired of Jesus
  terminal objectives in both the cognitive and
  behavioral domains.

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Jesus wept