After a request for some quotes to be recorded from the recent prospective parent meeting, we decided to post them here. We will keep adding, so be sure to check back for more!
The Christian Educator vs. Secular Educator
“We do not know what or how to teach children, because we do not know what a child is, and we do not know what a child is because we do not know what man is and Him from whom and for whom man is.
How decisive for the Christian educator, or for any educator of good will, is the revelation that man is made in the image and likeness of the three-personed God? That is like asking what difference it will make to us if we keep in mind that a human being is not for the processing of data, but for wisdom; not for the domination of nature, but for participation in it; not for the autonomy of an isolated self, but for communion.” ~ Anthony Esolen
On Classical Education:
“The greatest difference between classical education and non-classical education is formation. A school that does not intentionally and purposefully form its students in a way that encourages them to love truth, goodness, and beauty will intentionally or unintentionally form them to be shallow and relativistic in their thinking.” ~Holly Davis
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.” ~Gustav Mahler
“A good school does not just offer what the student or the parent or the state desires, but it says something about what these three ought to desire. A school is fundamentally a normative, not a utilitarian institution, governed by the wise, not the many.” ~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility
On Beauty
“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful” ~Socrates
“For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not yet found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not yet visited.” ~C.S. Lewis
On Relativism:
“We may soon be in a world in which a man may be howled at for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.” ~G.K. Chesterton (over a century ago)
On Language:
“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.” ~Ludwig Wittgenstein
On the Reading of Pagan Classics:
“I have been rebuked by godless men such as Odysseus, Cicero, and Pericles.
They strove for virtues I have not known or forsaken, virtues I have not known or forsaken, virtues that they couldn’t fully comprehend because they did not know Christ or possess His Spirit. Encountering virtuous pagans has provoked me to jealousy for the things of God.” ~Joshua Butcher
Ransom Fellowship School 