Michel de Montaigne Quotes

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil.

Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.

How we become moral and understand good and bad, and how we overcome our impulse towards violence, is all really important to me, as a person.

The moral faculties are generally esteemed, and with justice, as of higher value than the intellectual powers. But we should always bear in mind that the activity of the mind in vividly recalling past impressions is one of the fundamental though secondary bases of conscience. This fact affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being.

Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.

Every child must master empathy-based ethics because the rules are changing; the less they apply the less learning them has positive impact

It is the business of the teacher ... to fortify reason and to make conscience sovereign.

It is a prejudice to think that morality is more favourable to the development of reason than immorality.

If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.

We need to provide an education which teaches crit­ical thinking and encourages the development of mature moral values.

The formation of character in young people is educationally a different task from and a prior task to, the discussion of the great, difficult ethical controversies of the day.

We pay a price when we deprive children of the exposure to the values, principles, and education they need to make them good citizens.

The child becomes largely what it is taught; hence we must watch what we teach it, and how we live before it.

In ethics, we don't make progress by discovering pre-existent truths; we do so by solving problems.

I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.

Education is not complete unless we teach our children not only how to read and write but the difference between right and wrong.

To be a philosopher... is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

There is a danger when we give young people only a catalog of dos and don'ts. In these young minds, the gospel is not intellectually credible.

Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it? .. But in truth I know nothing about the philosophy of education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them.

Philosophy is fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth.

The majority of parents are poor psychologists and give their children the most questionable moral trainings. It is perhaps in this domain that one realized most how keenly how immoral it can be to believe too much in morality, and how much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world.

Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!

Children have almost an intuitive discernment between the maxims you bring forward for their use, and those by which you direct your own conduct.

If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.