Last week, I talked a bit about the book, Norms and Nobility by David Hicks. This book is a treatise on education, more specifically, classical education. I thought that I would share some quotations from the book that really hit home with me. These words inspire me as I attempt to give my children a classical education.
"No one has time to do more than a few things well; therefore, better to teach a few subjects thoroughly than to force a child to be a mediocrity in many subjects, destroying his standards." Pg. 127
" Basic skills and ideas should be introduced very early in a child's education and enlarged in subsequent years by re-introducing them at higher levels of complexity and abstraction." Pg. 128
"Any subject, no matter how potentially complex, can be taught to any student at any level. The secret is not in what is taught, but in how it is taught." Pg. 128
"Students learn excellence through the excellence of their model." Pg. 128
"Responsible learning requires a profound and intimate teacher-pupil relationship wherein the normative connection between knowledge and responsibility can be made." Pg. 128
"Only the careless and unskilled teacher answers questions before they are asked. The teacher's chief task is to provoke the question, not to answer it." Pg. 129
"Certainly, not until teachers take delight in reading old books and show faith in their life-guiding value will students enjoy studying the classics of their civilizations. One cannot help but ovserve the trend in modern schools to substitute light 'escape' reading for the more difficult classics..... the purpose of learning is discovery, not escape. Reading serves this purpose." Pg. 137
Julia lives on the Canadian Prairies with her 3 children (9,8,6) attempting to give them a classical education. You can read more at her blog.
