Learning and the future

“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
-Eric Hoffer

“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”
-Malcolm X

Ideologies

 "Every ideology based upon a false anthropology ceases. Because it's based upon a lie."
-Patrick Deneen

"Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence."
-Jordan Peterson

Love itself

 "Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being 'in love', which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two."

-Louis de Bernières from Captain Corelli's Mandolin

Extreme individualism

"All good ideas become false when you take them to their extreme, and we've taken individualism to the extreme."
-David Brooks

@49:25
The Trinity Forum - Evening conversation with David Brooks and Patrick Deneen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFHUvquu7RA 

Success leaves clues

 "Success leaves clues"
-Tony Robbins

Ithaka

Note: A fellow teacher who also went to St. John's Graduate Institute and had also taught in China sent me this poem when I got back from China

Ithaka

by C.P. Cavafy

Translated by Edmund Keeley

 

As you set out for Ithaka

hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.


Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.


Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn't have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

 
Shenzhen, China

 

 

The owl of Minerva

"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk."

-G.W.F. Hegel

An education to Greece

"Then there is a great difference between us and our opponents, in our attitude towards military security... Our city is open to the world... This is because we rely, not on secret weapons, but on our own real courage and loyalty...

We make friends by doing good to others, not by receiving good from them. This makes our friendship all the more reliable, since we want to keep alive the gratitude of those who are in our debt by showing continued goodwill to them: whereas the feelings of one who owes us something lack the same enthusiasm, since he knows that, when he repays our kindness, it will be more like paying back a debt than giving something spontaneously. We are unique in this. When we do kindnesses to others, we do not do them out of any calculations of profit or loss: we do them without afterthought, relying on our free liberality.
                 
Taking everything together then, I declare that our city is an education to Greece."

Pericles' Funeral Oration 490 BC
from Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

Acropolis of Athens by Leo von Klonze

Travel and motion

“South America was a problem in geography that could only be understood if one kept moving: to stay put was to be baffled.”

-Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express

Little platoons

“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.”
-Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

The value of generalists

"Somebody should have the courage not to specialise and to look at how one can bring things together. That is what I have tried to do."
-Ester Boserup

"Generalists are not held in high regard on campus or in our society unless they are big names, or else because they became generalists after first earning credibility as specialist... Since our society respects specialists and suspects generalists, perhaps the way to solve the shortage of generalists is by creating a new specialty in synthesis and system."
-Vartan Gregorian

"The Synthesizing Mind: the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others."
-Howard Gardner, Five Minds for the Future