On Education

As Joyce and I are traveling this week to further our understanding of options for the private, classical schooling of our kids, I’ve been doing some additional reading on the subject of education for young children.  Some great quotes I thought I would share with my readers:

John Milton also write "On Education" in 1644.

* “The end of learning is to repair the ruin of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge, to love him, to imitate him, to be like him.” (John Milton, 1644)

* “We atheists have not abolished God until we have abolished grammar.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

* “It tends to be the understanding of the state that public education is not to be religiously oriented in any way; it is to be neutral. This, of course, is manifestly impossible because you cannot have a curriculum of any type that is totally neutral. Every curriculum has a perspective, and that perspective is either theocentric or it is not. Either it acknowledges the ultimate sovereignty and supremacy of God or it does not. It may remain silent, but that silence is a statement.” (Dr. R. C. Sproul, Ligonier Ministries)

* “As arms, legs, hands, hearts, brains, lungs, and all the other body parts make a single human body—and as the plot, characters, setting, theme, and style make up a single story—all these subjects in the curriculum make up a single thing: an education, an e-ducare, a leading-out and leading-up into the light. It is a change, like an operation or a birth: a change in the student. It is a change from darkness to light, from small mind to large mind, that is, from ignorance to knowledge, and (much more important) from folly to wisdom.” (Dr. Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy, Boston College)

* “…we should approach claims on the part of a textbook and curriculum publisher to know the truth with great, great caution (not to say suspicion).  God has not revealed His truth through publishers.  He has revealed it within the context of a faithful, local worshipping community.” (Dr. Susan Wise Bauer, professor of English, The College of William and Mary)

~ by Adrian Schoonmaker on June 13, 2009.