Beauty in the Word Quotes

“To be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word

“Today, in a world with instant access to Google, we rely on the electronic web to supply everything we need, from historical facts to word definitions and spellings as well as extended quotations. All of us who use a computer are aware of the shock of inner poverty that we suddenly feel when deprived (by a virus or other disaster) of our mental crutches even just for a day or a week. Plato is right: memory has been stripped from us, and all we possess is an external reminder of what we have lost, enabling us to pretend to a wisdom and an inner life we no longer possess in ourselves.13”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

“The central idea of the present book is very simple. It is that education is not primarily about the acquisition of information. It is not even about the acquisition of ‘skills’ in the conventional sense, to equip us for particular roles in society. It is about how we become more human (and therefore more free, in the truest sense of that word). This is a broader and a deeper question, but no less practical. Too often we have not been educating our humanity. We have been educating ourselves for doing rather than for being.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

“If education is about the communication of values, or meaningful information, and of wisdom and of tradition, between persons and across generations, it is important to know that it can only take place in the heart; that is, in the center of the human person. A voice from the lungs is not enough to carry another along with the meaning of our words. The voice has to carry with it the warmth and living fire of the heart around which the lungs are wrapped.2”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

“This is one of many reasons why it is such a shame to deprive children of exposure to the greatest writers in the English language. In the great writers one can see how words are charged with meaning.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

“Heart Speaks Unto Heart. This motto of the Blessed John Henry Newman, adopted from St Francis de Sales, contains the essence of a ‘philosophy of communication,’ which is also a philosophy of education. If education is about the communication of values, or meaningful information, and of wisdom and of tradition, between persons and across generations, it is important to know that it can only take place in the heart; that is, in the center of the human person. A voice from the lungs is not enough to carry another along with the meaning of our words. The voice has to carry with it the warmth and living fire of the heart around which the lungs are wrapped.2”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

“the important thing, the real goal of study, is the ‘development of attention.’ Why? Because prayer consists of attention, and all worldly study is really a stretching of the soul towards prayer.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

“wise Socratic as he is, duly emphasizes. But he knows also that reason itself is far more than the nominally correct use of deductive rules. It involves the whole mind and its apprehension of the what outside: grass, and dogs, and rivers, and justice, and love. So the study of how to think is also a deepening of one’s first memories, or one’s first encounters with truth.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

“in the image and likeness of the three-Personed God? That is like asking what difference it will make to us if we keep in mind that a human being is made not for the processing of data, but for wisdom; not for the utilitarian satisfaction of appetite, but for love; not for the domination of nature, but for participation in it; not for the autonomy of an isolated self, but for communion. It is no accident that Caldecott has structured his plan for a true education upon the three ways of the Trivium, which themselves reflect the three primary axes of being, revealed by God:”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

“And most importantly of all, if education is to be effective it needs to be based on knowledge about the nature and purpose of human life—a true, or at least adequate, ‘anthropology.’ This knowledge is what the modern relativist thinks impossible.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

“It is the memory of time that makes us old; remembering eternity makes us young again.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

“education is not primarily about the acquisition of information. It is not even about the acquisition of ‘skills’ in the conventional sense, to equip us for particular roles in society. It is about how we become more human (and therefore more free, in the truest sense of that word). This is a broader and a deeper question, but no less practical. Too often we have not been educating our humanity. We have been educating ourselves for doing rather than for being.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

“Language, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary exist for a purpose, and that purpose is revealed only in the search for truth. As Chesterton saw, it is the search for truth that keeps us sane, because it always brings us back to reality. And why is reality so important? It is what we are made for. Reality is the food of the soul. I”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education