Sublime

Maria Popova,

Being a personalist, Day had a suspicion of bigness, whether it was big government or big corporations. Day even had a suspicion of big philanthropy. She was constantly urging her co-workers to “stay small”: Start your work from where you live, with the small concrete needs right around you. Help ease tension in your workplace. Help feed the person

The planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin with the administrative goals of a principal or president, or with the teaching goals of a professional educator, or with the learning goals of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the question, “What should someone learn?” but with the question, “What kinds of thin

His precepts on the teaching of natural history, certainly a significant part of the legacy, had far-reaching influence. “Never try to teach what you yourself do not know, and know well,” he lectured at Penikese his final summer. “Train your pupils to be observers. . . . If you can find nothing better, take a housefly or a cricket, and let each hol

Ultimately, though, Jordan realized that he was taking an even greater risk, one that finally pushed him out of the false comfort of quiet desperation.

Each person is a variable that can change—shifting the makeup of the whole.

Critical education theorist bell hooks, echoing Paulo Freire, calls this a “banking” model of education: we treat human learners as if they are safe-deposit boxes for knowledge and ideas, mere intellectual receptacles for beliefs. We then think of action as a kind of “withdrawal” from this bank of knowledge, as if our action and behavior were alway