A Quote by James K. A. Smith

What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? — © James K. A. Smith
What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect?
There are two roadblocks in the way of transforming India into an economic giant and one of them was education. I believe that if education is privatised at primary and secondary level, lot of our problems will be answered to
For the first time in history we can work backward from our imagination rather than forward from our past.
In Burma, we need to improve education in the country - not only primary education, but secondary and tertiary education. Our education system is very very bad. But, of course, if you look at primary education, we have to think in terms of early childhood development that's going back to before the child is born - making sure the mother is well nourished and the child is properly nurtured.
But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.
Music speaks of Platonic truth - the ideal river rather than the polluted reality, love as we dream it rather than we experience it, grief noble and uplifting rather than our distracted weeping. It is necessary to our survival and our sanity.
The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?
If you understand it from an ecological or sustainability perspective, agriculture is the primary way we meet most of our needs, and it's the greatest form of human intervention on our environment. It has intimately shaped our culture as powerfully as industrial modernity, but for ten thousand years rather than two hundred.
It is a fact that God wants to destroy every work of our flesh, but He never desires to destroy our personality. He takes no pleasure in transforming us into automata; rather He delights in having us cooperate with Him.
They would make the 'Church ' their great meeting-point, rather than the Atonement of Christ. As far as my experience goes, they have more devoutness and less devotion, more fear and less love, more feeling of duty than of desire, laying more stress on Phil. ii. 12 than ver. 13, and in practice working upon the intellect and imagination rather than aiming at the heart, skirmishing among the outworks rather than assaulting the citadel.
Who can keep us from recreating our life as we would like it to be-as it could, and should be? No one but ourselves can keep us from being artists, rather than marching forward like mere consumers, corporate robots, sheep. No one but ourselves can keep us from dancing with life instead of goose-stepping. In every moment recognizing our own creative imagination, the living picture we paint on the canvas of our lives. Everything is imagination. And imagination is freedom, but it can also be conditioning, bondage.
It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions.
When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.
Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. It is all we ever have, so we night as well work with it rather than struggling against it. We might as well make it our friend and teacher rather than our enemy.
All entertainment is education in some way, many times more effective than schools because of the appeal to the emotions rather than to the intellect.
If we put our soul into our work, if, rather than just going through the motions, what we do flows from the deepest part of our being, then after a burst of creativity, we need to replenish our souls.
To exterminate our popular vices is a work of far more importance to the character and happiness of our citizens than any other improvements in our system of education.
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