Reforming Education: No Quick Fix

• For the educational establishment... test scores are treated as indications of the extent to which the required ground covering has been done. ...as educationally significant. However, while they may be prognostic of a child's ability to get through school... they do not provide us with an appraisal of the child's progress in the long process of becoming a generally educated human being -- the advance made toward a more skillful, thoughtful, and cultivated mind.

• Many... have the wrong expectation of the profit to be derived from schooling. They think that the only purpose of schools is to prepare their children to earn a living. While that certainly is an objective to be served, it is, in terms of human values, less important than preparation for citizenship and for leading a richly rewarding, good human life. Even with regard to earning a living, ...in our high-tech economy, preparation for earning a good living is more readily secured by those who can read, write, speak, and figure well and who have learned how to think critically and reflectively, rather than by those given specialized job training...

• A report of the Carnegie Foundation recommended the abolition of the undergraduate bachelor of science degree in education leading to the state certification of teachers. Schools of education should become research institutions at the graduate level of the university and not places for the training of schoolteachers. Those planning to enter the profession of teaching should have four years of general, liberal education at the college level, and then three years of practice teaching under supervision... the best teacher is one who learns in the process of teaching.

• ...money-making and other external indices of social success must become subordinate to the inner attainments of moral and intellectual virtue.

• ...an adequate reform of public education in our school system cannot be accomplished by anything like a quick fix. We suspect that anyone who thinks otherwise cannot fully understand the shape of an adequate reform or all the obstacles to be overcome in achieving it.

• ...it is only by struggling with difficult books, books over one's head, that anyone learns to read.

• The books to be read should not be limited to those written in English.... Instead it should be devoted to the great works of history, biography, philosophy, theology, natural science, social science, and mathematics, as well as the... tradition of Western literature -- in English translation... Its aim should not be a survey of Western civilization, but an effort to understand the basic ideas and issues in Western thought.

• Every seminar should involve at its conclusion the assignment of a short composition in which students would attempt to state how their understanding of the book discussed in the seminar was increased by their participation in the discussion.

• ...our political democracy depends upon the reconstitution of our schools. Our schools are not turning out young people prepared for the high office and the duties of citizenship in a democratic republic. Our political institutions cannot thrive, they may not even survive, if we do not produce a greater number of thinking citizens, from whom some statesmen of the type we had in the eighteenth century might eventually emerge. We are, indeed, a nation at risk, and nothing but radical reform of our schools can save us from impending disaster... Whatever the price... the price we will pay for not doing it will be much greater.

Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography (1977)

• [I]f local civil government is necessary for local civil peace, then world civil government is necessary for world peace.

Unsourced

• The great books of ancient and medieval as well as modern times are a repository of knowledge and wisdom, a tradition of culture which must initiate each generation.

• The Paideia Program seeks to establish a course of study that is general, not specialized; liberal, not vocational; humanistic, not technical. Only in this way can it fulfill the meaning of the words "paideia" and "humanities," which signify the general learning that should be in the possession of every human being."