This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them; and these two objects are always attainable together and by the same means; the training which makes men happiest in themselves also makes them most serviceable to others.
Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. It is not teaching the youth the shapes of letters and the tricks of numbers, and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to roguery, and their literature to lust. It means, on the contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their bodies and souls. It is a painful, continual and difficult work, to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept and by praise, but above all - by example.
Education | Example | Kindness | Literature | Lust | Means | People | Praise | Precept | Training | Warning | Work | Youth | Youth |
Education is the leading human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them; and these two objects are always attainable together, and by the same means; the training which makes men happiest in themselves also makes them most serviceable to others.
Education is the leading human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them; and these two objects are always attainable together, and by the same means. The training which makes men happiest in themselves also makes them most serviceable to others.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
Infants instinctively resist enculturation because they intuitively sense in it a denial of life that robs us of our spirit and our loving, willing, thinking, being. Resistance is futile. Without exception, these cultural techniques involve carefully masked threats that prey upon the child’s rapidly learned fear of pain, harm, or deprivation, and more primal anxiety over separation or alienation from parent, caregiver, or society. “Do this or you will suffer the consequences.” This threat, in fact, underlies every facet of our life from our first potty training through university exams.
Alienation | Anxiety | Anxiety | Consequences | Fear | Harm | Life | Life | Pain | Sense | Society | Spirit | Thinking | Training | Will |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
The greatest threats to human survival will not be natural ones, but originate from inside ourselves.. For our ancestors, understanding themselves better was a pleasant luxury. But nowadays learning to control the mind may have become a greater priority for survival than seeking any further advantages the hard sciences could bring.
Better | Control | Learning | Luxury | Mind | Survival | Understanding | Will |
Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
What is needed to make democracy work as it is not now working- to bring into existence in reality a sound conception of democracy? The mass liberal education of the mass electorate. Not just schooling, but an education that involves moral training as well as training of the mind.
Democracy | Education | Existence | Mind | Reality | Sound | Training | Work |
The most important part of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows to manhood, he will have to be perfected.
Education | Excellence | Important | Play | Right | Soul | Training | Will | Excellence | Child |
This harmony of the soul, taken as a whole, is virtue; but the particular training in respect of pleasure and pain, which leads you always to hate what you ought to hate, and love what you ought to love from the beginning of life to the end, may be separated off; and, in my view, will be rightly called education.
Beginning | Education | Harmony | Hate | Life | Life | Love | Pain | Pleasure | Respect | Soul | Training | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Respect |
Where old men have no shame, there young men will most certainly be devoid of reverence. The best way of training the young is to train yourself at the same time; not to admonish them, but to be always carrying out your own admonitions in practice.
Men | Practice | Reverence | Shame | Time | Training | Will | Old |
The study of history is in the truest sense an education and a training for political life... The most instructive, or rather the only, method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of fortune is to recall the catastrophes of others.
Dignity | Education | Fortune | History | Learning | Life | Life | Method | Sense | Study | Training | Vicissitudes |
The less government we have the better - the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man; of whom the existing government is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.
Abuse | Appearance | Better | Character | Government | Growth | Imitation | Individual | Influence | Man | Power | Wise | Government |
The less government we have the better – the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government is the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.
Abuse | Better | Character | Government | Growth | Individual | Influence | Power | Government |
William Jones, fully Sir William Jones of Nayland, aka Trinity Jones
Voices of the glorified urge us onward. they who have passed from the semblances of time to the realities of eternity call upon us to advance. The rest that awaits us invites us forward. We do not pine for our rest before God wills it. We long for no inglorious rest. We are thankful rather for the invaluable training of difficulty, the loving discipline of danger and strife. Yet in the midst of it all the prospect of rest invites us heavenward. Through all, and above all, God cries, “Go forward!” “Come up higher.”
Danger | Difficulty | Discipline | Eternity | God | Rest | Time | Training | Wills | Danger | God |
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned, and however early a person's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that they learn thoroughly.
D. W. Winicott, fully Donald Woods Winnicott
The first ego organization comes from the experience of threats of annihilation which do not lead to annihilation and from which, repeatedly, there is recovery
Ego | Experience | Organization |
Dante, full name Durante degli Alighieri, aka Dante Alighieri NULL
The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.
Hell | Neutrality |