Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities Book

Although the language of this book is kind of hard to understand and I don't fully agree to all the author's ideas, but there're some really enlightening words that are thought-provoking.

Here're some sentences underlined by me when reading this book:

1. Education must be based on the certainty that faults cannot be atoned for, or blotted out, but must always have their consequences.

2. Only the people who can play with children are able to educate them. For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors.

3. Not leaving the child in peace is the greatest evil of present-day methods of training children. Education is determined to create a beautiful world externally and internally in which the child can grow.

4. The art of natural education consists in ignoring the faults of children nine times out of ten, in avoiding immediate interference, which is usually a mistake, and devoting one's whole vigilance to the control of the environment in which the child is growing up, to watching the education which is allowed to go on by itself.

5. Try to leave the child in peace; interfere directly as seldom as possible; keep away all crude and impure impressions; but give all your care and energy to see that personality, life itself, reality in its simplicity and in its nakedness, shall all be means of training the child.

6. But at present, in most cases, children of tender yeas, as well as those who are older, are sacrificed to the chaotic condition of the home. They learn self-will without possessing real freedom, they live under a discipline which is spasmodic in its application.

7. Why, in a word, the old and the young generation are as mutually dependent as the roots and flowers of plants, so often separate with mutual repulsion.