This week has provided a pair of gems for me to ponder. Both quotes are from men of God. The first is from a contemporary Roman Catholic priest and prolific author, the second from a Baptist minister and legendary civil rights leader.
Father George Rutler, pastor of The Church of Our Saviour in New York, had this to say about education:
“I’d encourage your youngest one to abandon kindergarten altogether. Almost everything I learned was learned outside the classroom, and school itself interrupted my education. Moreover, school locks you in with your peers. That is a mistake. One’s social circle should never include one’s equals. From my earliest years I found children uninteresting and always preferred the company of adults. This was an advantage, because I got to know lots of folks who are dead now whom I never would have known if I had waited until I was an adult. - So I have a collective memory - and oral tradition - that goes back to the eighteenth century, having spoken with people who knew people who knew people who knew people who lived then. - The only real university is the universe and a city its microcosm. That is why an expression like “New York University” is foolish. New York City is the university….Instead of school, children should spend some hours each day in hotel lobbies talking to the guests. They should spend time in restaurant kitchens and shops and garages of all kinds, learning from people who actually make the world work….One day spent roaming through a real classical church building would be the equivalent of one academic term in any of our schools, and a little time spent inconspicuously in a police station would be more informative than all the hours wasted on bogus social sciences. Formal lessons would only be required for accuracy in spelling and proficiency in public speaking, for which the public speakers in our culture are not models, and in exchange for performing some menial services a child could learn the violin, harp, and piano from musicians in one of the better cocktail lounges, or from performers in the public subways….So I urge you to keep your child out of kindergarten, because kindergarten will only lead to first grade and then the grim sequence of grade after grade begins and takes its inexorable toll on the mind born fertile but gradually numbed by the pedants who impose on the captive child the flotsam of their own infecundity.”
The quote came at the ideal time for me - a time that I was revisiting my educational philosophy and in great need of a pep talk. Father Rutler managed to sum up just about everything I have always believed about how I should be educating my children.
HT: Mary G and Michele Q
And Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream that I have always shared for my own children. The universality of the sentiment is that you can replace “nation” with “world”, and “the color of their skin” with anything that people might use to judge others.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
What it boils down to, for me, is the truth that we are raising our children for eternity. And one day, I pray that every person will value goodness, integrity, and wisdom regardless of the color of another’s skin, his wallet, his physical or mental abilities, or the place of his birth.
Amen?
