Saturday, April 27, 2013

Quote for the day: To order our thoughts (Parents' Review Volume Two)

"The Teaching of Chronology," by Dorothea Beale, Principal of the Cheltenham Ladies' College.  The Parents' Review, Volume 2, no. 2, 1891/92, pgs. 81-90
"I am sure those who have once learnt in their youth to use the chart will never discard it and will, as they go on to think about the philosophy of history, find that the way in which events present themselves to the mind's eye is most helpful and suggestive. The day of 'Mangnall's Questions,' 'Brewer's Guide,' and 'Pinnock's Catechisms'* is gone by in the work of education, and we have learned to feel that the chief work of the educator is not to give facts, but to order them so that they can fit into the 'forms of thought.'"
"In the beautiful myth with which more than one poet of our day has made us familiar, we read that the forlorn Psyche in the course of her wanderings came to the temple of Aphrodite, and there the goddess assigned to her the task of sorting out and arranging innumerable seeds, and to her diligence and obedience was granted at last the vision which she had lost through her faithless impatience--the vision of the God of Love. Is this, perhaps, one of the teachings unfolded in the myth--the supreme joy is to know love but the vision of God is to be attained only by the patient discipline, by the ordered knowledge through which that which seems chaos is transformed into a Kosmos, and we are able to 'think God's thoughts after Him?'"
 *These were not books of religious catechism, but they were set up in a similar way to teach school subjects. 

Lovely photo of 'George' tomato seeds found here.

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