Aristotle

We are what we repeatedly do.

Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

“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.”

 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).

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? 

Sitting Bull

Comenius, 17th Century Educator and Education Critic

School is the slaughterhouse of the mind.

William Butler Yeats, English Poet

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

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 child’s 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.

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)}

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 names…It 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?”

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:

1. Command of abstractions2. Ability to think within systems3. Ability to evaluate ideas4. Ability to communicate effectively

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 wages…We 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.

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 galoot’s ashore.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

William Graham SumnerA Founding Father of Sociology

That we are good and others are bad is never true

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)

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 intellectual…making the objects of our knowledge subjectively our own. (Idea of A University, 1852).

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)

The Lesson by an anonymous author

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

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…

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 don’t remember

this?” And John said, “The other disciplines didn’t

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?”

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.

Jesus wept