OXFORD TUTORIALS

Words of Wisdom:

"School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and
adventurers.  School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically
and independently.  Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your
own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored.  Urge them to take on
the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy,
music, art, economics, theology--all the stuff schoolteachers know well
enough to avoid."

John Taylor Gatto, New York Teacher of the Year 1989-1991
"Against School," Harper's (September, 2003)

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be,
since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be... Who has a
harder fight than he who is striving to overcome himself?

Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ

"I mean to suggest that without a transcendent and honorable purpose, schooling
must reach its finish, and the sooner we are done with it, the better."

Neil Postman
The End of Education (A. Knopf, 1996)  

"An education which is not religious is atheistic;
there is no middle way.  If you give to children an account of the world from which God
is left out, you are teaching them to understand the world without reference to God.
If he is then introduced, he is an excrescence.  He becomes
an appendix to his own creation."

William Temple (1881-1944)
Archbishop of Canterbury 1942-1944

"Truth cannot be sacrificed at the altar of pretended tolerance.
 Real tolerance is deference to all ideas, not indifference to the truth."

Ravi Zacharias, Quoted by Charles Colson
Breakpoint (8/23/02)   

"Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate
to the government of any other."

John Adams, Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, 11 October, 1798

"As far as we know, the human being is the only creature
that experiences a sense of homesickness
even while sitting at home"

G. K. Chesterton

"No truly authoritarian government can tolerate those who
have a real absolute by which to judge its arbitrary absolutes
and who speak out and act upon that absolute."

Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?

In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum,
et Deus erat Verbum
(In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and God was the Word.)
John 1:1

"For the resolutions of the just depend rather on the grace of God than on their own wisdom;
and in Him they always put their trust, whatever they take in hand.  For man proposes,
but God disposes; neither is the way of man in his own hands".
(Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit: Man proposes, but God disposes.)

Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ, I.19

Quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te
(For you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.)

Augustine, Confessions, Bk. 1, Chap. 1

"There is no such thing as an uninteresting subject,
there are only uninterested people."

G. K. Chesterton

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,
the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

C.S.Lewis, Mere Christianity, Bk. 3, Chap. 10

It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles
at which one falls, only one at which one stands.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chap. 6,
"The Paradoxes of Christianity"

"The better one is, the worse one becomes,
if one ascribes this excellence to oneself."

Pascal, citing St. Bernard
Pensees 191

"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out
that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and
therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark."

C.S.Lewis, Mere Christianity

"Alone among the world's great religions, Christianity gives value and meaning
to evil and suffering. British novelist Dorothy Sayers captured the essence of this.
Christianity, she wrote 'affirms...that perfection is attained through the active
and positive effort to wrench a real good out of a real evil.'  This is the essence
of what Christians call redemption, and it underscores another truth: We have to
understand the evil in ourselves before  we can truly embrace the good in life."

Chuck Colson, Breakpoint (July, 2005)

"Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves;
so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves."

Jesus, Matthew 10:16