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).
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?
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 abstractions
2. Ability to think within systems
3. Ability to evaluate ideas
4. 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 Newman
The Idea of a University
1852
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 Newman
The Idea of a University
1852
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 Newman
The Idea of a University
1852
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 Sumner
A 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…
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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 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