“Without ongoing training in tailoring instruction to individual learners (and support in doing so), “fault” for underperformance or disengagement from learning is frequently shifted to the child: The child is lazy, has an attitude problem, or refuses to work up to his or her potential. The child is enormously vulnerable in this system.”

“But if you believe that adults can ‘make’ children learn well—in the absence of or in defiance of a child’s inner sense of confident engagement with the power of discovery and mastery—then, in my view, you are placing that child at great risk of failure as a learner.”

“In fact, I think that our society expects schools to get students to the point where they do things only for outside rewards. People who perform tasks for their internal reasons are hard to control. Now, I don't think teachers get up in the morning and say to themselves, 'I', going to go to school today and take away all those young people's internal motivations' ...but that's exactly what often happens.”

“Objectivism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use. It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside of himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man’s problems, the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. This is not easy.”

“A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system.”

“We take a cavalier approach to Scripture at our own peril. If the scientific and historical accounts are true, then the commandments, promises and penalties are much more so. The Bible is not just a guideline. It is the authoritative Word of God. Disobeying it has consequences. Obeying it has rewards. Yet we fudge. We compromise. We rationalize. We trade away our spiritual integrity for man’s approval and as we do, we gradually erode our ability to distinguish right from wrong, to see our own failings, and to turn back in repentance to God. We simply have no idea how this cavalier attitude towards God’s Word taints our witness and hinders the kingdom of God.”

“She never typed her real name into her netbook in case it got key-logged, had no physical hard drive, and would boot up from a tiny microSD card that she could quickly swallow if the police ever came to her door.”