Prologue

    The best thing for being sad, said Merlin, is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies. You may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins. You may miss your only love. You may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then --- to learn, learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you.

                                                                T. H. White, The Once and Future King

    Only the brave should teach. Only those who love the young should teach. Teaching is a vocation. It is as sacred as priesthood; as innate a desire, as inescapable as the genius which compels a great artist. If he has not the concern for humanity, the love of living creatures, the vision of the priest and the artist, he must not teach.

                                                                Pearl S. Buck
 

            It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull and long school is.  The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most incredible and unending effort.  Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don’t believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.  School is not easy and it is not for the most part very much fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher.  Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck.  I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any great artists.  Teaching even might be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

            My three had things in common- they all loved what they were doing.  They did not tell- they catalyzed a burning desire to know.  Under their influence, the horizons sprang wide and fear went away and the unknown became knowable.  But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and precious. 

                                                         John Steinbeck
 

    The aim of education should not be to teach how to use human energies to improve the environment, for we are finally beginning to realize that the cornerstone of education is the development of the human personality, and that in this regard education is of immediate importance for the salvation of mankind.

                                                                Maria Montessori

We may now define in a more precise manner the aim of education. It is to guide man in the evolving dynamism through which he shapes himself as a human person --- armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, and moral virtues --- while at the same time conveying to him the spiritual heritage of the nation and the civilization in which he is involved, and preserving in this way the century-old achievements of generations.

                                                                Jacques Maritain
 

    Where the old (education) initiated, the new merely "conditions." The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly: the new deals with them more like the poultry-keeper deals with young birds --- making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation --- men transmitting manhood to men: the new is merely propaganda.

                                                                C. S. Lewis