Teaching the Trivium

Darin and I are kinda-sorta reading through Teaching the Trivium with an online yahoogroup.  We are in chapter three, the rest of the group is on chapter seven????  Something like that.  :-) 

 

Anyway, I love some of the quotes that are in this chapter.  They were very prophetic as you'll see.

 

"I am sure as I am of Christ's reign, that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Chrisitan and atheistic unbelif, and of antisocial nihilistic ethics, individual, social, and political, which this sin rent world has ever seen."

A.A. Hodge, Princeton Theologian, circa 1869

 

Here are a few from the "other" side.

 

"Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism.  What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour a week and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?"

Charles F. Potter in the Humanist magazine, 1930

 

"I am convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity....The teacher must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit....The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new - the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism."

John Dunphy in the Humanist magazine, Jan/Feb 1983