Thursday, March 11, 2010

Quotes from Fabric of Faithfulness

Finally reading The Fabric of Faithfulness a few days before it's due to go back to the library, and came across some quotes I want to keep track of.

Milan Kundera:
The devil laughs because God's world seems senseless to him, ; the angel laughs with joy because everything in God's world has its meaning.

Kundera again:
Can there be major dimensions of a poem, a painting, a musical composition created in the absence of God?

Those two quotes are from page 88 of the book. On page 90 we have one from Neil Postman:

In consideration of the disintegrative power of Technopoly, perhaps the most important contribution schools can make to the education of our youth is to give them a sense of ocherence in their sutdies, a sense of purpose, meaning and interconnectedness in what they learn. Modern secular education is failing not because it doesn't teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social or intellectual centre. There is no set of ideas or attitudes that permeates all parts of the curriculum. The curriculum is not, in fact, a 'course of study' at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses 'skills.' In other words, a technocrat's ideal - a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills.

How that rings true with our own educational system, and may well be the reason - or at least part of it - as to why so many students at University behave like such fools.

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