Educators From The United States

"Clayton M. Christensen is the architect of and the world's foremost authority on disruptive innovation, a framework which describes the process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors."

"There was a time when philosophy might have been defined as the science of human activity, so all-comprehensive was it. The ambitious Greek who would attach his name to a philosophical system must include in his scheme all that could be known, done, and speculated about God, the world, and man. In the course of time and the specialization of the sciences this view of philosophy fell away, and was replaced by the more exact and narrower conception of modern times."

"The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason."

"1. The human mind is so constructed that it must see every perception in a time-relation—in an order—and every perception of an object in a space-relation—as outside or beside our perceiving selves. 2. These necessary time-relations are reducible to Number, and they are studied in the theory of number, arithmetic and algebra. 3. These necessary space-relations are reducible to Position and Form, and they are studied in geometry. Mathematics, therefore, studies an aspect of all knowing, and reveals to us the universe as it presents itself, in one form, to mind. To apprehend this and to be conversant with the higher developments of mathematical reasoning, are to have at hand the means of vitalizing all teaching of elementary mathematics."

"The United States is in sore need today of an aristocracy of intellect and service. Because such an aristocracy does not exist in the popular consciousness, we are bending the knee to the golden calf of money. The form of monarchy and its pomp offer a valuable foil to the worship of money for its own sake. A democracy must provide itself with a foil of its own and none is better or more effective than an aristocracy of intellect and service."

"There is, I venture to think, no ground for the ordinarily accepted statement of the relation of philosophy to theology and religion. It is usually said that while^hilosophy is the creation of an individual mind, theology or religion is, like folk-lore and language, the product of the collective mind of a people or a race. This is to confuse philosophy with philosophies, a conmion and, it must be admitted, a not unnatural confusion. But while a philosophy is the creation of a Plato, an Aristotle, a Spinoza, a Kant, or a Hegel,^hilosophy itself is, like religion, folk-lore and language, a product of the collective mind of humanity. It is advanced, as these are, by individual additions, interpretations and syntheses, but it is none the less quite istinct from such individual contributions. philosophy is humanity's hold on Totality, and it becomes richer and more helpful as man's intellectual horizon widens, as his intellectual vision grows clearer, and as his insights become more numerous and more sure. Theology is philosophy of a particular type. It is an interpretation of Totality in terms of God and His activities. In the impressive words of Principal Caird, that philosophy which is theology seeks "to bind together objects and events in the links of necessary thought, and to find their last ground and reason in that which comprehends and transcends all— the nature of God Himself." Religion is the apprehension and the adoration of the Grod Whom theology postulates. If the whole history of philosophy be searched for material with which to instruct the beginner in what philosophy really is and in its relation to theology and religion, the two periods or epochs that stand out above all others as useful for this purpose are Greek thought from Thales to Socrates, and that interpretation of the teachings of Christ by philosophy which gave rise, at the hands of the Church Fathers, to Christian theology. In the first period we see the simple, clear-cut steps by which the mind of Europe was led from explanations that were fairy-tales to a natural, well-analyzed, and increasingly profound interpretation of the observed phenomena of Nature. The process is so orderly and so easily grasped that it is an invaluable introduction to the study of philosophic thinking. In the second period we see philosophy, now enriched by the literally huge contributions of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, intertwining itself about the simple Christian tenets and building the great system of creeds and thought which has immortalized the names of Athanasius and Hilary, Basil and Gregory, Jerome and Augustine, and which has given color and form to the intellectual life of Europe for nearly two thousand years. For the student of today both these developments have great practical value, and the astonishing neglect and ignorance of them both are most discreditable."

"Many definitions have been given of the word “education,” but underlying them all is the conception that it denotes an attempt on the part of the adult members of a human society to shape the development of the coming generation in accordance with its own ideals of life. It is true that the word has not infrequently been used in wider senses than this."

"On the eve of that going out, we gather to participate in this stately and solemn service to Almighty God, in Whose name this University was founded and in Whose name it has labored from generation to generation... Wherever the cause of liberty is in danger, there Columbia's hand will be found to help avert it. Wherever the rule of despotism is extending, there Columbia's hand will be found to remove It. Wherever there is need of scientific skill and genius to serve, to cure, to invent, to construct, there a Columbia hand will be found ready to do its duty for the advancement of the public good and for the glory of Almighty God."

"There is no .man, there is no people, without a God. That God may be a visible idol, carved of wood or stone, to which sacrifice is offered in the forest, in the temple, or in the market-place; or it may be an invisible idol, fashioned in a man's own image and worshipped ardently at his own personal shrine. Somewhere in the universe there is that in which each individual has firm faith, and on which he places steady reliance. The fool who says in his heart "There is no God" really means there is no God but himself. His supreme egotism, his colossal vanity, have placed him at the center of the universe which is thereafter to be measured and dealt with in terms of his personal satisfactions. So it has come to pass that after nearly two thousand years much of the world resembles the Athens of St. Paul's time, in that it is wholly given to idolatry; but in the modern case there are as many idols as idol worshippers, and every such idol worshipper finds his idol in the looking-glass. The time has come once again to repeat and to expound in thunderous tones the noble sermon of St. Paul on Mars Hill, and to declare to these modern idolaters "Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you." There can be no cure for the world's ills and no abatement of the world's discontents until faith and the rule of everlasting principle are again restored and made supreme in the life of men and of nations. These millions of man-made gods, these myriads of personal idols, must be broken up and destroyed, and the heart and mind of man brought back to a comprehension of the real meaning of faith and its place in life. This cannot be done by exhortation or by preaching alone. It must be done also by teaching; careful, systematic, rational teaching, that will show in a simple language which the uninstructed can understand what are the essentials of a permanent and lofty morality, of a stable and just social order, and of a secure and sublime religious faith. Here we come upon the whole great problem of national education, its successes and its disappointments, its achievements and its problems yet unsolved. Education is not merely instruction far from it. It is the leading of the youth out into a comprehension of his environment, that, comprehending, he may so act and so conduct himself as to leave the world better and happier for his having lived in it. This environment is not by any means a material thing alone. It is material of course, but, in addition, it is intellectual, it is spiritual. The youth who is led to an understanding of nature and of economics and left blind and deaf to the appeals of literature, of art, of morals and of religion, has been shown but a part of that great environment which is his inheritance as a human being. The school and the college do much, but the school and the college cannot do all. Since Protestantism broke up the solidarity of the ecclesiastical organization in the western world, and since democracy made intermingling of state and church impossible, it has been necessary, if religion is to be saved for men, that the family and the church do their vital cooperative part in a national organization of educational effort. The school, the family and the church are three cooperating educational agencies, each of which has its weight of responsibility to bear. If the family be weakened in respect of its moral and spiritual basis, or if the church be neglectful of its obligation to offer systematic, continuous and convincing religious instruction to the young who are within its sphere of influence, there can be no hope for a Christian education or for the powerful perpetuation of the Christian faith in the minds and lives of the next generation and those immediately to follow. We are trustees of a great inheritance. If we abuse or neglect that trust we are responsible before Almighty God for the infinite damage that will be done in the life of individuals and of nations.... Clear thinking will distinguish between men's different associations, and it will be able to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and to render unto God the things which are God's."

"Public opinion* is the unseen product of education and practical experience. Education, in turn, is the function, in co-operation, of the family, the church and the school. If the family fails in its guiding influence and discipline and if the church fails in its religious instruction, then everything is left to the school, which is given an impossible burden to bear. It is just this situation which has arisen in the United States during the generation through which we are still passing. In overwhelming proportion, the family has become almost unconscious of its chief educational responsibility. In like manner, the church, fortunately with some noteworthy exceptions, has done the same. The heavy burden put upon the school has resulted in confused thinking, unwise plans of instruction and a loss of opportunity to lay the foundations of true education, the effects of which are becoming obvious to every one. Fundamental dis cipline, both personal and social, has pretty well disappeared, and, without that discipline which develops into self-discipline, education is impossible. What are the American people going to do about it? If they do not correct these conditions, they are simply playing into the hands of the advocates of a totalitarian state, for that type of state is at least efficient, and it is astonishing to how many persons efficiency makes stronger appeal than liberty. Then, too, we have many signs of an incapacity to understand and to interpret liberty, or to distinguish it from license. There is a limit to liberty, and liberty ends where license begins. It is very difficult for many persons to understand this fact or to grasp its implications. If we are to have freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of the press, why should we not be free to say and think and print whatever we like? The answer is that the limit between liberty and license must be observed if liberty itself is to last. To suppose, as many individuals and groups seem to do, that liberty of thought and liberty of speech* include liberty to agitate for the destruction of liberty itself, indicates on the part of such persons not only lack of common sense but lack of any sense o humor. If liberty is to remain, the barrier between liberty and license must be recognized and observed."

"When you remember how few Jews there are in Italy and how relatively few there are in Germany, one must wonder at the violence and the bitterness of this perse cution. The number of Jews in Italy is only a small fraction of those in the city of New York, while there are in the city of New York six times as many Jews as there were in the German Reich when the last war ended and possibly more than four times as many as there are there now. Yet the persecution, personal, physical, family, financial, goes on, openly and secretly, in a way that is perfectly appalling. To my great astonishment, this anti-Semitic persecution has been violently and publicly revived in this country within the last few weeks or months, and it is as discreditable to us that this should have happened as anything that we can imagine.' Jews differ among themselves just as do Spaniards or Italians or Canadians or Americans. There are some who belong to one party, some who belong to another some whp hold one point of view, some who hold a point of view that is contradictory. The notion that all who belong to that race or profess that faith are of one mind in everything that relates to their public relationships is a grotesque departure from fact. But if you can play upon an excited public emotion by the use of these terms and by the insinuation that the entire Hebrew population is engaged, let us say as we have been told from the platform recently in trying to get this nation into war, such statements, although absolutely contradictory to every well-known fact, will, if repeated long enough, be believed and acted upon by a certain number of our unthinking population. We cannot protest too vigorously and too strongly against that sort of thing. It may be the Ku Klux Klan persecuting the Catholics, it may be the anti-Semites persecuting the Jews: but persecution on racial or religious ground has absolutely no place in a nation given over to liberty and which calls itself a democracy."

"Both anti-Semitism and the Ku Klux Klan are an insult to democracy and a contradiction of it. But faith honest, sincere, hopeful, opens a door to moving forward in this new and very difficult world in which our children must live. It opens the door into that world in a spirit inspired by something more than the merely human, the gain-seeking and the temporary. It brings us, our children and our grandchildren, in touch with the eternal verities which are the only possible foundation for a civilization and a life that are worthy of human ambition and human endeavor."

"The moral ideal has disappeared in all that has to do with international relations. The gain-seeking impulse supported by brute force has taken its place, and so far as the surface of things is concerned human civilization has gone back a full thousand years. Inconceivable though it be, we are brought face to face in this twentieth century with governments of peoples once great and highly civilized, whose word now means absolutely nothing. A pledge is something not to be kept, but to be broken. Cruelty and national lust have displaced human feeling and friendly international co-operation. Human life has no value, and the savings of generations are wasted month by month and almost day by day in mad attempts to dominate the whole world in pursuit of gain. How has all this been possible? What has happened to the teachings and inspiring leadership of the great prophets and apostles of the mind, who for nearly three thousand years have been holding before mankind a vision of the moral ideal supported by intellectual power? What has become of the influence and guidance of the great religions Christian, Moslem, Hebrew, Buddhist with their counsels of peace and good-will, or of those of Plato and of Aristotle, of St. Augustine and of St. Thomas Aquinas, and of the outstanding captains of the mind Spanish, Italian, French, English, German who have for hundreds of years occupied the highest place in the citadel of human fame? The answer to these questions is not easy. Indeed, it sometimes seems impossible. Are we, then, of this twentieth century and of this still free and independent land to lose heart and to yield to the despair which is becoming so widespread in countries other than ours? Not for one moment will we yield our faith or our courage! We may well repeat once more the words of Abraham Lincoln: "Most governments have been based on the denial of the equal rights of men, ours began by affirming those rights. We made the experiment, and the fruit is before us. Look at it think of it!" However dark the skies may seem now, however violent and apparently irresistible are the savage attacks being made with barbarous brutality upon innocent women and children and non-combatant men, upon hospitals and institutions for the care of the aged and dependent, upon cathedrals and churches, upon libraries and galleries of the world s art, upon classic monuments which record the architectural achievements of centuries we must not despair. Our spirit of faith in the ultimate rule of the moral ideal and in the permanent establishment of liberty of thought, of speech, of worship and of government will not, and must not, be permitted to weaken or to lose control of our mind and our action."

"All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work."

"Where the forms of civil, religious and political liberty still exist, they must be strengthened and given new power over the hearts as well as over the minds of men. Faith must not be lost, and courage must not be lacking. The call is for every civilized human being who believes in justice, in liberty and in public morals. The bell is ringing!"

"Whether it be generally recognized or not, what we call the civilized world, which for seven hundred years has been moving steadily forward in the spirit of liberalism and toward liberalism s high ideals, has now turned suddenly and violently backward. The guidance of reason and of understanding, of moral principle and of religious faith, has been shockingly and cruelly disslaced by the rule of brute force. Our literally stupendous achievements in literature, in philosophy, in the arts, in the sciences and in the comforts and conveniences of life count for nothing in the control of no national policy and of national conduct, and by far the major portion of the world is now under the rule of brutal compulsion. Such portion of the world as is not in that condition may soon be struggling for its life."

"The technological changes that damage established companies are usually not radically new or difficult from a technological point of view. They do, however, have two important characteristics: First, they typically present a different package of performance attributes—ones that, at least at the outset, are not valued by existing customers. Second, the performance attributes that existing customers do value improve at such a rapid rate that the new technology can later invade those established markets."

"We contest the conclusions of scholars such as Tushman and Anderson (1986), who have argued that incumbent firms are most threatened by attacking entrants when the innovation in question destroys, or does not build upon, the competence of the firm. We observe that established firms, though often at great cost, have led their industries in developing critical competence-destroying technologies, when the new technology was needed to meet existing customers’ demands."

"Our findings support many of the conclusions of the resource dependence theorists, who contend that a firm's scope for strategic change is strongly bounded by the interests of external entities (customers, in this study) who provide the resources the firm needs to survive."

"Only the general manager can mold the resources, processes, and values that affect innovation, into a coherent capability to develop and launch superior new products and services repeatedly."

"It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time."

"Disruptive technologies typically enable new markets to emerge. There is strong evidence showing that companies entering these emerging markets early have significant first-mover advantages over later entrants."

"Generally, were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream"

"The concept of the value network — the context within which a firm identifies and responds to customers' needs, solves problems, procures input, reacts to competitors, and strives for profit — is central to this synthesis."

"Adrian Slywotzky believes the Internet will overturn the inefficient push model of supplier-customer interaction. He predicts that in all sorts of markets, customers will use choiceboards—interactive, on-line systems that let people design their own products by choosing from a menu of attributes, prices, and delivery options. And he explores how the shifting role of the customer—from passive recipient to active designer—will change the way companies compete."

"[There is a distinguishes between] low-end disruption which targets customers who do not need the full performance valued by customers at the high end of the market and "new-market disruption" that targets customers that could previously not be served profitably by the incumbent."

"[Descriptive research provides] an accurate description or picture of the status or characteristics of a situation or phenomenon."

"During the early stages of an industry, when the functionality and reliability of a product isn't yet adequate to meet customer's needs, a proprietary solution is almost always the right solution -- because it allows you to knit all the pieces together in an optimized way. But once the technology matures and becomes good enough, industry standards emerge. That leads to the standardization of interfaces, which lets companies specialize on pieces of the overall system, and the product becomes modular. At that point, the competitive advantage of the early leader dissipates, and the ability to make money migrates to whoever controls the performance-defining subsystem. In the modular PC world, that meant Microsoft and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), and the same thing will happen in the iPod world as well. Apple may think the proprietary iPod is their competitive advantage, but it's temporary. In the future, what will matter will be the software inside that lets users find exactly the kind of music they want to listen to, when and where they want to, with minimal effort."

"I think [the Vista fiasco] will allow [Apple] to survive for a bit longer."

"[T]he prediction of [my disruption] theory would be that Apple won't succeed with the iPhone. They've launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat: It's not [truly] disruptive. History speaks pretty loudly on that, that the probability of success is going to be limited."

"Low-end disruption occurs when the rate at which products improve exceeds the rate at which customers can adopt the new performance."

"Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team"

"Free verse may be written as very beautiful prose; prose may be written as very beautiful free verse. Which is which ?"

"There is one way, and only one, of correctly reading a Latin hexameter. There may be three or four ways of reading an English blank verse line. I venture to say that no two mortals ever read aloud any given long passage of verse with precisely the same rhythms."

"It shouldn't be hard to imagine just what most of the crew must have thought when they first looked across the open hill-side and saw their boss seemingly playing with a matchbook in dry grass. Although the Mann Gulch fire occurred early in the history of the Smokejumpers, it is still their special tragedy, the one in which their crew suffered almost a total loss and the only one in which their loss came from the fire itself. It is also the only fire any member of the Forest Service had ever seen or heard of in which the foreman got out ahead of his crew only to light a fire in advance of the fire he and his crew were trying to escape. In case I hadn't understood him the first time, Sallee repeated, "We thought he must have gone nuts." A few minutes later his fire became more spectacular still, when Sallee, having reached the top of the ridge, looked back and saw the foreman enter his own fire and lie down in its hot ashes to let the main fire pass over him."

"This was Norman’s remarkable ability — to imagine how highly sophisticated philosophical and critical ideas continually relate to our everyday life. This remarkable synthesis of the intellectual and the practical pervades his writing, transforming the experiences he had in the midst of western mountains and rivers into paradigms of human life and thus accomplishing the ultimate goal of fiction."

"There is not a writer in the world who will not jump with the shock of recognition when Maclean discerns iambic pentameter in the business of the whorehouse, a second epiphany when everything heard sorted itself into rhythms. … Here Maclean, at seventeen, becomes conscious of the shape of language, the way it falls on the ear. In that whorehouse, ill, dazed, and swimming in and out of consciousness, he became the writer who bloomed fifty-odd years later."

"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash."

"It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

"Everything that was to happen had happened and everything that was to be seen had gone. It was now one of those moments when nothing remains but an opening in the sky and a story — and maybe something of a poem. Anyway, as you possibly remember, there are these lines in front of the story:"

""From the singular appearance of this place I called it the gates of the rocky mountains," Captain Lewis said in his journals. Its singular appearance makes it a fitting backdrop for early and everlasting drama in which nature plays the leading role."

"In the Gates of the Mountains there have been many blowups. Now there are many rattlesnakes and nothing more fragile than mountain goats, themselves tougher than the mountains they disdain, although at a distance they are white wings of butterflies floating up and down and sideways across the faces of fragments of arches and cliffs, touching but never becoming attached to them."

"Help," he said "is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly."

"Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts — hopefully, even the arch to the sky."

"A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help."

"My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things — trout as well as eternal salvation — come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy."

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman."

"Painted on one side of our Sunday school wall were the words, God is Love. We always assumed that these three words were spoken directly to the four of us in our family and had no reference to the world outside, which my brother and I soon discovered was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana."

"Scholars are still in search of the exact meaning of certain speeches in each of Shakespeare’s great tragedies — and we should like to assume that those who saw these plays for the first time did not have perfect understanding of all of the lines — but so great was Shakespeare’s power to conceive of action from which thought and feeling can be readily inferred that all of us know Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth more intimately than we know many men whose remarks we understand perfectly."