Leon Botstein Quotes

Every generation tries to put its doctrine on a high shelf where the children can not reach it.

Everything that we used to think got taught at home now seemingly has to be taught in the public school system, and something is going to get lost in the process.

[the difference between the old and the new education being] in a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.

People ask how could I be so conservative. Well, I was born to people raised in 1889.

It is home schooling that is rejecting a narrowness. It is not a radical value system; it's actually quite conservative.

For conservatives, the issue is that for generations now, they have failed to make the case for their values. They haven't even conveyed conservative values to many of their children. And when they have, the university has often succeeded in undoing them.

I do not innovate. I transmit.

My greatest concern is that Mitt Romney seldom addresses the social issues publicly... I'm referring to the sanctity of human life, the traditional definition of marriage, and religious liberty.

lessons must be learned anew by each succeeding generation, and that generation is fortunate indeed which learns from other than its own bitter experience.

With but a few exceptions, we don't have this personal study under masters any more. Craftsmanship has sunk very low. We no longer have any universally creative persons who are able to guide young learners not only in technical matters but also, at the same time, in a formal way.

By definition, conservatives struggle with change.

The school has always been the most important means of transferring the wealth of tradition from one generation to the next. This applies today in an even higher degree than in former times, for through modern development of economic life, the family

We live not by things, but by the meaning of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.

Looking back on a 30-year teaching career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I can't completely believe that I spent my time on earth institutionalized; I can't believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting machine, robbing people of their children. Did it really happen? Was this my life? God help me.

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

We put [young children] into kindergarten where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and give them prizes for sleeping.

What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.

Sometimes to think about why some institutions are stable, it's interesting to go one generation back and look at the author of that stability.

Preventing the new generation from changing in any deep way is what most societies require of their educators.

Why do we tell stories? It's because we want to connect to people, we want to tell them who we are, we want to tell them a story that affects us, that impacts us. And to help a young filmmaker doing a short or independent film is my testament, I think, is my desire to really make sure that our younger generations get passed along all the elders' experience and to literally have the image - to literally carry them on their shoulders and say, 'This is what the world is. This is how the world operates. Let me show you how.'

The transmission of values from one generation to the next is the single most important task of the society. ...What am I doing to shape the values of the society?

Music was the medium through which knowledge was passed from generation to generation.

There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves. It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to our children.

Messages about money are passed down from generation to generation, worn and chipped like the family dishes.