1.proverbs
The primary of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s time.
Next in importance is to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.
Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
*It is the purpose of education to help us become autonomous, creative, inquiring people who have the will and the intelligence to create our own destiny.
*The most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others. This is the basic architecture of a life; the rest is to ornamentation and decoration of the structure.
The essence of our effort is to see that every child has a chance must be to assure each a opportunity, not to become equal, but become to different-to realize whatever unique potential of a body, and spirit he or she possesses.
If you can read and don’t, you are an illiterate by choice.
教育的目的
Throughout the nation and history, it has emphasized public education as a means of transmitting democratic values, creating equality of opportunity and preparing new generations of citizens in society.
The school’s job is to enhance the natural development of the growing child, rather than to pour information.
Life skills---logical thinking, analysis, creative problem solving.
The actual content of lessons is secondary to the progress, which is supposed to train the child to be able to handle whatever life may present including all the unknowns of the future. Students and teachers both regard pure memorization as uncreative and vulgar.
Schoolchildren have a great deal of free time, which they are encouraged to fill with extracurricular activities, that supposed to inculcate such qualities as leadership, sportsmanship, ability to organize, etc.
Education should aim at improvement of both one’s morals and faculties.
Madison once wrote that, the competing, balancing interests of a diverse people can help ensure the survival of liberty. But there are values that all American citizens share that we should want all students to know and to make their own: honesty, fairness, self-discipline, fidelity to task, friends, and family, personal responsibility, love of a country, and belief in the principles of liberty, equality, and the freedom to practice one’s faith.
Honesty: Abe Lincoln walking three miles to return six cents
Courage: Aesop’s shepherd boy who cried wolf
Persistence: civil war
Respect the law: Socrates---I must submit to the decree of Athens
As any parent knows, teaching character is a difficult task. But it is a crucial task, because we want our children to be not only healthy, happy, and successful, but decent strong and good. None of these happens automatically; there is no genetic transmission of virtue. . It takes careful attention.
I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure.
The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics –an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective—are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field.
Ultimately it will be the students’ own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be the prisoners of their parents’ dreams and the classmates’ fears. They must be jolt into believing in themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future.
College should be open-ended: at the end it should open many, many roads.
There is no one “right way” to get ahead—that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point, and bound for a different destination.
