Preliminary Education Quotes

I put forward at once — lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily — the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see — accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts.

In our own day anonymity has acquired a far more pregnant significance than is perhaps realized: it has an almost epigrammatic significance. People not only write anonymously, they sign their anonymous works: they even talk anonymously...Nowadays one can talk with any one, and it must be admitted that people's opinions are exceedingly sensible, yet the conversation leaves one with the impression of having talked to an anonymity. The same person will say the most contradictory things and, with the utmost calm, make a remark, which coming from him is a bitter satire on his own life. The remark itself may be sensible enough, and of the kind that sounds well at a meeting, and may serve in a discussion preliminary to coming to a decision, in much the same way that paper is made out of rags. But all these opinions put together do not make one human, personal opinion such as you may hear from quite a simple man who talks about very little but really does talk. People's remarks are so objective, so all all-inclusive, that it is a matter of complete indifference who expresses them, and where human speech is concerned that is the same as acting 'on principle'. And so our talk becomes like the public, a pure abstraction. There is no longer any one who knows how to talk, and instead, objective thought produces an atmosphere, an abstract sound, which makes human speech superfluous, just as machinery makes man superfluous. In Germany they even have phrase-books for the use of lovers, and it will end with lovers sitting together talking anonymously. In fact there are hand-books for everything, and very soon education, all the world over, will consist in learning a greater or lesser number of comments by heart, and people will excel according to their capacity for singling out the various facts like a printer singling out the letters, but completely ignorant of the meaning of anything.

All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move toward rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold,or do not hold, is looked on as matter of indifference. They can me granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.

I insist on the following point: people should finally stop confusing philosophical labourers and scientific people in general with philosophers - that in this particular matter we strictly assign "to each his due" and do not give too much to the former and much too little to the latter. It may be that the education of a real philosopher requires that he himself has stood for a while on all of those steps where his servants, the scientific labourers in philosophy, remain - and must remain. Perhaps he must himself have been critic and sceptic and dogmatist and historian and, in addition, poet and collector and traveller and solver of riddles and moralist and prophet and "free spirit" and almost everything, in order to move through the range of human worth and feelings of value and to be able to look with a variety of different eyes and consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every expanse. But all these things are only pre-conditions for his task: the task itself seeks something different - it demands that he create values. Those philosophical labourers on the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to establish some large collection of facts or other concerning estimates of value - that is, earlier statements of value, creations of value which have become dominant and for a while have been called "truths." They have to press these into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or politics (morality) or art. The task of these researchers is to make everything that has happened and which has been valued up to now clear, easy to imagine, intelligible, and manageable, to shorten everything lengthy, even "time" itself, and to overpower the entire past, a huge and marvellous task, in whose service every sophisticated pride and every tough will can certainly find satisfaction. But the real philosophers are commanders and lawgivers: they say "That is how it should be!" They determine first the "Where to?" and the "What for?" of human beings, and, as they do this, they have at their disposal the preliminary work of all philosophical labourers, all those who have overpowered the past - they reach with their creative hands to grasp the future. In that process, everything which is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their "knowing" is creating; their creating is establishing laws; their will to truth is - will to power. - Are there such philosophers nowadays? Have there ever been such philosophers? Is it not necessary that there be such philosophers?....

Program Evaluation and Educational Research (PEER) Associates, they created the Place-based Education Evaluation Collaborative (PEEC). Findings about student achievement are still preliminary, but PEEC’s work regarding other impacts of place-based education on students and teachers reiterates much that has surfaced from earlier studies about the positive effect that situating learning in authentic contexts can have on student motivation and involvement.

researchers exploring the impact of mindfulness training on children, adolescents, and adults have revealed a wide range of positive outcomes including: improvements in executive functions such as the regulation of attention, emotion, behavior, and relatedness; physiological enhancements in our immune function; elevations in the enzyme (telomerase) that maintains and repairs the ends of our chromosomes; and even preliminary findings suggesting the optimization of the control molecules on our genes (epigenetic regulatory histones and methyl groups) that help prevent certain forms of disease.

These programs have been successfully integrated into schools in the US, Canada, and/or the UK; have a clearly articulated curriculum that can be easily accessed and replicated; are based in developmentally appropriate practice; and have some preliminary evidence of efficacy that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

There is a fascinating passage in Nietzche’s Twilight of the Idols that is one of the great passages in philosophical literature, and you don’t have to agree with anything else Nietzsche says, but this is a real gem: Writing about education in Germany in the 1880s, which very much describes our educational situation today, he says: “I shall straightaway set down the three tasks for the sake of which one requires educators. One has to learn to see, one has to learn to think, one has to learn to speak and write: the end in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see – habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgment, to investigate and comprehend the individual case in all its aspects. This is the first preliminary schooling in spirituality; not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in one’s control. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what is called in unphilosophical language ‘strong will-power’: the essence of it is precisely not to ‘will,’ the ability to defer decision. All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus – one has to react, one obeys every impulse.” He later says, with great psychological insight, “almost everything which we crudely name ‘vice’ is merely this physiological incapacity not to react.” He further states: “A practical application of having learned to see: one will have become slow, mistrustful, resistant as a learner in general. Jeff Nyquist