Educators From England

"“Frankly Jess, on the grand scale—” “You can’t think on the grand scale. You have to think on the small scale. Otherwise no-one’d ever do anything.”"

"That’s almost like the daft things you believe when you’re really little, like I use to believe I could fly. I believed it for years, but it had to be kept secret. I knew if I ever told anyone or showed it off to anyone, I’d lose the power. And if I doubted it, and tried it out just to see, I’d lose the power — so I didn’t. I believed in it. I knew I would be able to fly when there really was a need. Which, fortunately for me, there never was."

"I have had considerable experience in dealing with minds of low logical power, and have found that studies may be made so easy and mechanical as to render thought almost superfluous."

"Good free verse is not at all easy to write, for there is no repetitive beat to lull the reader's critical faculty, much pattern and discipline is to be found in it, though the pattern of sounds and choice of exact words, gives it its beauty."

"Rhythm includes metre, but metre is a relatively small part of rhythm."

"Dialogue never ends not for lack of time or opportunity but for essential reasons."

"Philosophy in its very act is a process of translation!"

"After Hegel, philosophy confronts the possibility of its own death, and in some sense has to do so if it is to remain the most fundamental kind of thinking."

"The point is that philosophy is seen to have come full circle, and to have exhausted itself."

"Nietzsche's problem is how to be a philosopher once he has grasped the finitude of philosophy."

"To understand how indirect communication is possible we must grasp what it is about ordinary communication that is being changed."

"Nietzsche would say my friends lacked ears."

"What I would like to show is that there is a vital dimension of their writing, which I call performative reflexivity, which if ignored or misunderstood will impede an adequate response to it."

"We are passengers, comprehended and displaced by metaphor."

"Philosophy is an everlasting fire, sometimes damped down by setting itself limits, then flaring into new life as it consumes them. Every field of inquiry is limited, but philosophy has an essential relation to the question of limits, to its own limits."

"The educated man is the man who does not live in immediate intuition, but in his recollection so that little is new to him any longer."

"Like literature, philosophy is not distinguished from other subjects by a specific approach to a subject-matter independent of it. Chemistry deals with chemicals, biology with life and astronomy with very large, very distant objects. Philosophy can boast no such definite subject-matter."

"To say that all philosophy is writing is, minimally, to say that it is never the transparent expression of thought."

"Philosophy is said to have taken the 'linguistic turn' in this century. One hundred years ago, a philosopher would think in terms of mind, spirit, experience, consciousness; now the by-word is language."

"To recognize a difficulty is not to solve it."

"Language steps in where the angels of experience fear to tread."

"Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a single conception of ability. At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence."

"For most of us the problem isn’t that we aim too high and fail - it’s just the opposite - we aim too low and succeed."

"Whoever thought of the No Child Left Behind legislation and its title certainly understands irony because millions of our children are indeed being left behind. This standardized testing is making the job of teachers unnecessarily difficult, limiting the discretion of teachers to teach. School systems are imposing conformity instead of promoting creativity."

"If you’re doing something you love, an hour seems like 5 minutes. If you are doing something that doesn’t resonate with your spirit 5 minutes can seem like an hour. And the reason that so many people are opting out of Education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion."

"We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education. And it’s impoverishing our spirits and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies."

"I saw a well-meaning policy statement that said ‘College begins in Kindergarten'. No it doesn’t, Kindergarten begins in Kindergarten. A friend of mine once said ‘A Three-Year old is not half a Six-Year old."

"It is my contention that Creativity is as important today in Education as Literacy and we should treat it with the same status."

"We have, over the centuries, devised a management structure for running things, whether firms or whole countries. This structure depends absolutely on the limitations of the human hand, eye, and brain. The discoveries of management cybernetics, coupled with the techniques of operational research and with the new technology of automation, make possible a new way of running things which is not so limited. Yet we insist on retaining the original structures and automating them. In so doing, we enshrine in steel, glass, and semiconductors those very limitations of hand, eye, and brain that the computer was invented precisely to transcend."

"The system of transportation is not coherent; it is not treated as integral. Roads compete with railroads and airlines in chaotic fashion, and at immense cost to the nation."

"Clearly, if it is possible to have a self-regulating system that implicitly arranges its own stability, then this is of the keenest management interest."

"The problem with managing either a business or a prison by periodic rather than continuous inspection is that the "variables" are likely to be seriously out of control before the discrepancy is noted."

"The development of the Watt governor for steam engines, which adapted the power output of the engine automatically to the load by means of feedback, consolidated the first Industrial Revolution."

"Management problems are not respecters of the company organization, nor of the talents of the people appointed to solve them."

"It is terribly important to appreciate that some things remain obscure to the bitter end."

"A slowly moving queue does not move uniformly. Rather, waves of motion pass down the queue. The frequency and amplitude of these waves is inversely related to the speed at which the queue is served."

"The whole picture is complicated by the stockists and merchants who will try to exploit any shortages that may appear. The result is this. The feedback information from the industry's environment consists, first and foremost, of a forward order load. Much of this "demand for steel" will be bogus."

"Certain management policies-stretching of credit resources, for example-may lead to great progress in good conditions; but, like the Grand Prix car in comparison with the Land Rover, they may not be robust enough to survive when the going gets tough."

"There is, then, a logical priority about the arrangements, and logic has nothing to do with time."

"The aim of management science is to display the best course of action in a given set of circumstances, and this must include all the circumstances."

"A stochastic process is about the results of convolving probabilities-which is just what management is about, as well."

"It is the concept of likelihood that a real understanding of probability resides, and we must learn how to measure it."

"According to the science of cybernetics, which deals with the topic of control in every kind of system (mechanical, electronic, biological, human, economic, and so on), there is a natural law that governs the capacity of a control system to work. It says that the control must be capable of generating as much "variety" as the situation to be controlled."

"The strategies that managers employ are at least as important as the facilities at their disposal."

"Too close a view may interfere with one's grasp of an overall problem or concept"

"Policy-making, decision-taking, and control: These are the three functions of management that have intellectual content."

"An internal combustion engine is 'clearly' a system ; we subscribe to this opinion because we know that the engine was designed precisely to be a system. It is, however, possible to envisage that someone (a Martian perhaps) totally devoid of engineering knowledge might at first regard the engine as a random collection of objects. If this someone is to draw the conclusion that the collection is coherent, forming a system, it will be necessary to begin by inspecting the relationships of the entities comprising the collection to each other. In declaring that a collection ought to be called a system, that is to say, we acknowledge relatedness. But everything is related to everything else. The philosopher Hegel enunciated a proposition called the Axiom of Internal Relations. This states that the relations by which terms are related are an integral part of the terms they relate. So the notion we have of any thing is enriched by the general connotation of the term which names it; and this connotation describes the relationship of the thing to other things... [There are three stages in the recognition of a system]... we acknowledge particular relationships which are obtrusive: this turns a mere collection into something that may be called an assemblage. Secondly, we detect a pattern in the set of relationships concerned: this turns an assemblage into a systematically arranged assemblage. Thirdly, we perceive a purpose served by this arrangement: and there is a system."

"Hence we may recognize the subject of management cybernetics — which is seen as a rich provider of models for doing OR."

"If cybernetics is the science of control, management is the profession of control"

". There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do."