Investigative Learning Inspires Quotes

Remember when your curiosity inspired your investigative mind to explore and learn… you weren’t bogged down with resentment, cynicism, and emotional baggage… just think about how great it would be to return to that mindset of unencumbered learning and adventurous living… you are just one choice away from that life… choose to let go of the infertile past… go live your adventure!

If a man does not investigate into the matter of Bushidō daily, it will be difficult for him to die a brave and manly death. Thus it is essential to engrave this business of the warrior into one's mind well. One should put forth great effort in matters of learning. One should read books concerning military matters, and direct his attention exclusively to the virtues of loyalty and filial piety. Having been born into the house of a warrior, one's intentions should be to grasp the long and the short swords and to die.

My generation has a giddy delight in dissolution. [...] To inspire the unsophisticated young to demand "change" is an easy and a cheap trick— it was the tactic of the Communist Internationale in the thirties, another "movement.[...] We were self-taught in the sixties to award ourselves merit for membership in a superior group–irrespective of our group’s accomplishments. We continue to do so, irrespective of accomplishments, individual or communal, having told each other we were special. We learned that all one need do is refrain from trusting anybody over thirty; that all people are alike, and to judge their behavior was “judgmental”; that property is theft. As we did not investigate these assertions or their implications, we could not act upon them and felt no need to do so. For we were the culmination of history, superior to all those misguided who had come before, which is to say all humanity. Though we had never met a payroll, fought for an education, obsessed about the rent, raised a child, carried a weapon for our country, or searched for work. Though we had never been in sufficient distress to call upon God, we indicted those who had. And continue to do so.

As the scandal spread and gained momentum, Cardinal Law found himself on the cover of Newsweek, and the Church in crisis became grist for the echo chamber of talk radio and all-news cable stations. The image of TV reporters doing live shots from outside klieg-lit churches and rectories became a staple of the eleven o’clock news. Confidentiality deals, designed to contain the Church’s scandal and maintain privacy for embarrassed victims, began to evaporate as those who had been attacked learned that the priests who had assaulted them had been put in positions where they could attack others too. There were stories about clergy sex abuse in virtually every state in the Union. The scandal reached Ireland, Mexico, Austria, France, Chile, Australia, and Poland, the homeland of the Pope. A poll done for the Washington Post, ABC News, and Beliefnet.com showed that a growing majority of Catholics were critical of the way their Church was handling the crisis. Seven in ten called it a major problem that demanded immediate attention. Hidden for so long, the financial price of the Church’s negligence was astonishing. At least two dioceses said they had been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy after being abandoned by their insurance companies. In the past twenty years, according to some estimates, the cost to pay legal settlements to those victimized by the clergy was as much as $1.3 billion. Now the meter was running faster. Hundreds of people with fresh charges of abuse began to contact lawyers. By April 2002, Cardinal Law was under siege and in seclusion in his mansion in Boston, where he was heckled by protesters, satirized by cartoonists, lampooned by late-night comics, and marginalized by a wide majority of his congregation that simply wanted him out. In mid-April, Law secretly flew to Rome, where he discussed resigning with the Pope.

Many people today acquiesce in the widespread myth, devised in the late 19th century, of an epic battle between ‘scientists’ and ‘religionists’. Despite de unfortunate fact that some members of both parties perpetuate the myth by their actions today, this ‘conflict’ model has been rejected by every modern historian of science; it does not portray the historical situation. During the 16th and 17th centuries and during the Middle Ages, there was not a camp of ‘scientists’ struggling to break free of the repression of ‘religionists’; such separate camps simply did not exist as such. Popular tales of repression and conflict are at best oversimplified or exaggerated, and at worst folkloristic fabrications. Rather, the investigators of nature were themselves religious people, and many ecclesiastics were themselves investigators of nature. The connection between theological and scientific study rested in part upon the idea of the Two Books. Enunciated by St. Augustine and other early Christian writers, the concept states that God reveals Himself to human beings in two different ways – by inspiring the sacred writers to pen the Book of Scripture, and by creating the world, the Book of Nature. The world around us, no less than the Bible, is a divine message intended to be read; the perceptive reader can learn much about the Creator by studying the creation. This idea, deeply ingrained in orthodox Christianity, means that the study of the world can itself be a religious act. Robert Boyle, for example, considered his scientific inquiries to be a type of religious devotion (and thus particularly appropriate to do on Sundays) that heightens the natural philosopher’s knowledge and awareness of God through the contemplation of His creation. He described the natural philosopher as a ‘priest of nature’ whose duty it was to expound and interpret the messages written in the Book of Nature, and to gather together and give voice to all creation’s silent praise of its Creator.

INTEGRITY IS: Empirical knowledge is one of the critical ingredients of integrity, followed by truth, which is not necessarily moral, hence the evaluation of the truth. Empirical knowledge, coupled with the evaluation of truth for determination of its morality, equals factual righteousness and subsequently perpetuates integrity. Perceptions can at times influence our evaluation of truth, which may ultimately influence our identification of a subject’s morality. Our perception of what is truthful and righteous is not necessarily others interpretations. Assumption and credulity is the archenemy—the nemesis, if you will—of truth and ultimately of morality. We sometimes have an unwillingness or aversion toward researching a subject before formulating an opinion. But the more knowledge we learn about a subject, the more beneficial it will be. Understanding based on factual data will enable a more realistic and enhanced resolution of questions about a subject’s morality. Do some investigation of facts, situations, ideology, and belief systems for your empirical knowledge. As you do so, the truth shall be brought to the surface. As you analyze empirical knowledge, the truth and its morality will determine the factual righteousness of the subject, and ultimately, its integrity. Integrity Equation: Empirical knowledge + truth + morality = factual righteousness = INTEGRITY

validates educators’ trust in children’s capacity to learn as a result of their innate curiosity and ability to process and master new information in the same way they master language. Sunnyside students’ strong performance on statewide tests gives credence to her faith in this process. An added benefit occurs when the emotional content of the learning experience inspires children to continue investigating a topic on their own time outside of school, another facet of what it means to trust in students’ capacity to learn.

For years, Aldrich had pondered the vastness of that horizon, feeling always that just beyond the grasp of the understanding, something important waited. Deep in his heart he knew it was the vastness of this unknown horizon that had inspired him for years to carry on the patient, mind-wrenching toil necessary even to begin to investigate extrasensory perception. He hadn’t expected to learn everything about the psi ability—the work of centuries would be necessary for that—but he knew he would die happy if he could add just one fragment of demonstrable fact to the oceans of speculation on the subject. If the unknown was as vast as the sands of all the seashores on earth, his prayer had always been, “Dear God, let me understand just one grain of sand. Let me have just one grain of sand, one known fact. You have so many grains of sand—give me just one.” This, from Aldrich, who was not a religious man!

As described in Jason Berry’s richly detailed 1992 book, Lead Us Not into Temptation, what they learned from Church leaders left them stunned: