“To educate children religiously requires a quietude of mind and sympathy in their guardians, with the state of the good seed in them, which will lead rightly to discriminate between good and evil; to discover the corrupt source of many seeming good actions; and to perceive that a real innocency is the root of others….”
“Children in elementary grades and younger don’t have the same kind of definitional boundaries that adults frequently have between time for work, time for play, and time to be connected with a sense of wonder and awe. For them, work, play, and a sacred space or sense of wonder are all the same thing and it doesn’t have to be named….”
“You do not read in all the Holy Scriptures that any of the Holy men of God were Cambridge or Oxford scholars, or university men, or called Masters; but, on the contrary, they were plain men, and laboured with their hands, and taught freely, as they had received it freely from the Lord.”
“Friends’ peace testimony challenges us all to be peace educators. We may not all be teachers, but we are all communicators, and we all need to be learners. Peace education should be seen as an integral part of our peace testimony. But it is essentially something one does, and not something one talks about…. Learning, to be educated, means changing one’s behavior, and peace education therefore aims at changing our own individual behavior. We communicate our values by the manner of our lives….”
“Only by imagining the world we want to create will we be able to envision the education system we need. Only by recognising the opportunity for every child to be an expression of God’s glory, and by unleashing the everyday prophet in every member of our societies, children, young people and those who work with them alike, will we edge closer to the Kingdom of Heaven our Quaker forebears were so certain was ours for the having.”
“I can truly ascribe all my knowledge in divine things to the inward manifestation of grace and truth, the teaching of the Holy Spirit. It was Christ, the Light of the world, the Life of men, who opened to me the Scriptures, and gave me a discerning of their meaning; and, as I was faithful and obedient to the pointings of Truth, I was favored with further and clearer discoveries thereof.”
“To seek our divinity merely in books and writings is to seek the living among the dead: we do but in vain seek God many times in these, where his Truth too often is not so much enshrined, as entombed: no; intra te quære Deum, seek for God within thine own soul…. That is not the best and truest knowledge of God which is wrought out by the labour and sweat of the brain, but that which is kindled within us by an heavenly warmth in our hearts.”
“Keep close to the Light and own it alone to be your teacher, guide, and counselor in all the way through which you are to pass, and in all things that you are to do. Stand in the denial of self and all its goals, and own the Light which leads into singleness of mind unto God away from selfish ends.”
“How does anyone ever learn a really new thing? Since utopias are by definition ‘new,’ ‘not-yet,’ ‘other,’ human beings will be able to function in them in ways that do not throw us back to the old order only if we pay enough attention to the learning. Wishful thinking about the desired transformation of consciousness as an inevitable historical process distracts us from studying the difficult disciplines that will make transformation possible.”
“Because of the intimate nature of our work, teachers often tightly wrap our own identities into how our students perform: if the child does well, we do well; if the child struggles and falls down, we sink too. If not done mindfully, we can lose ourselves in our work – confusing the work for living fully.”
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