Aristotle (Learning pg. 32), Topic: Education: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”

Churchill, Winston (Culture pg. 217), Topics: Learning: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Eggleston, Edward (Learning pg. 397), Topic: Education, Schools: “A contemporary of President Abraham Lincoln, in 1889 wrote about Lincoln being self-taught: ‘Many boys and girls who have good schools and good books never learn to think for themselves.’”

Einstein, Albert (Learning pg. 356), Topic: Education: “It’s a miracle that modern education hasn’t yet completely smothered the curiosity necessary for scientific study.”

Plato (Learning pg. 384), Topic: Responsibility, Technology: “…Yet a true creator is necessity, which is the mother of our invention.”

Genghis Khan (Culture pg. 48), Topic: Governing: “Conquering the world on horseback is easy; it is dismounting and governing that is hard.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Culture pg. xi), Topics: Culture, Memory: “Culture is survival. Memory is culture. Society is losing all three. Survival is in jeopardy when memory, books, and clouds disappear. Past thoughts create cultural understanding.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Culture pg. 68), Topics: Culture, Economics, Immigration: “As population ages, societies throughout history have always adopted cultural changes, usually by slavery or immigration (similar labor systems) to maintain economic status.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Culture pg. 193), Topics: Culture, Servants, School System: “Historically, through smiles, tears, and threats of thrashing for a practical cause, cultured youth grew. When taught properly, servants, no matter their lowly beginning status, have become leaders. Today’s school system of training servants seems to be a slow castration of young minds. Impotency developed over years is evidenced in university graduates who can only function in team environments, or clerking menial jobs.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Culture pg. 192-193), Topics: Education, Servants, Society: “Servants are a valuable resource to society. Those with post-secondary education do not want to be called servants, but most support society through medical, financial, nutritional, recreational, hospitality, and government services.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Culture pg. 101), Topics: Education, Immigration, Service: “Historically, education was for those who needed it—those who physically and mentally worked. Even with limited education, developing countries are supplying many of the world’s manufactured goods. A dwindling supply of young workers with slack work ethics will not be able to supply the wants of the population. Eventually, service needs will not be met, or immigrants will fill the void. As Baby Boomers age and young adults delay entering the workforce, there is increasing need to squeeze more from those that do work. The trend cannot continue.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Culture pg. 94), Topics: Education, School-Age Children, Social Customs: “World history documents that current society is full of ‘me-first’ aboriginals. Narcissists can look in the mirror and see how original they are. Schools reinforce it. No society in history has been so self-centered. Allowing children to have independent educational responsibilities will force them to gradually break free of parent praise and force them to proudly prove their worth.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Culture pg. 75), Topics: Government, Parents, Responsibility: “When government steps in to take care of children…parents have an excuse to shirk responsibility for parenting. Instead, a team is needed, as in the old African proverb ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. There is a cultural difference in meaning. Historically, especially when the proverb originated, someone was a child until puberty. Now in the twenty-first century, underdeveloped and developed countries consider teens and young adults ‘children’ and are defined as such on healthcare and other laws.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Culture pg. 193), Topics: Economics, Parenting, Responsibility, Social Customs: “When I was young, it was automatically assumed you were on your own when you graduated from high school. You were an adult. Economic responsibility had automatically shifted away from parent to child at age eighteen. Now, many (adult) children think it is their parent’s responsibility to pay for their college education. When child/parent time is inadequate during youth and the child is not given responsibility around the home, parents try to keep their children from growing up. Parents with more years of formal education seem to be more likely to restrict their child’s maturity.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 277), Topics: School-Age Children, Parenting, Social Customs: “By nature children learn in families with a broad range of ages, not in schools. A single child often seems older because he or she more likely emulates parents than children of the same age. Defying nature, children are classed and only taught in school with children their own age.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 217), Topics: Education Policy, Social Science: “The world has an education problem. Education became political. The United States had a very good school system. As an Agricultural nation converted into an industrialized one, education was adequate to develop minds to innovate and use chemistry, physics, and biology to explore novel ideas. They rose above dreams of centuries past by developing ideas through public and private schools, self-study, and self determination. When education became political, innovation slowed as government got more involved. Every level of education from preschool through PhD research is now politicized. Since politics lag innovation, education must be removed from national and state politics. Otherwise, expect slow learning….”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Culture pg. 46), Topics: Aboriginal, Native American, Localite, Cosmopolite: “Before the British prisoner ships, known as the First Fleet, landed on the Australian shore in 1788 A.D., aboriginals roamed their continent for thousands of years. There was no central government. Before French General de Trobriand arrived on American’s Northern Great Plains in the 1860s, organized as tribes, the Natives taught their children how to hunt. Before Judean Desert Bedouin shepherds discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in a cave near Qumran in 1946 A.D., their youth tended sheep. …Throughout thousands of years of civilization localites were assumed to be standard, normal people. They did not need a term defining their status to an outsider. Cosmopolite, once defined, needed the flipside.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 159), Topics: Busiphobia, Students: “Compared to attending a few classes each week, brains are jolted from work’s impact. Fear sets in from what I will term (Busiphobia) ‘acquired business immunity”—resistance to business generated by a lifetime separation from it.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 172), Topics: Busiphobia, Education: “For thousands of years, education level of those in business and government has been about equal. In recent decades…those with higher education increasingly trend toward government jobs…a busiphobia shift has gradually occurred.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 127), Topics: Business, Schools, Technology: “Schools are stagnant. By nature, stagnate systems are not as adept as the rest of society. Is it any wonder students follow teachers’ lead in fearing business technology? Technology is new. It is scary. Business is outside the system that has protected them.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 33), Topics: Business, Taxpayer, University: “Businesses try to block competition to increase their sales or services. Universities are businesses that tend to isolate themselves at taxpayer expense.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 33), Topics: Business, Professors: “Many university professors…do not want someone contaminated by business, to pollute their isolated thoughts.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Culture pg. 205), Topics: Children, Parenting: “Expecting working grandparents to provide babysitting services is unusual; so is expecting grandparents to interrupt their retirement to help raise another generation. After having a child, young parents need to accept responsibility like they have never had before. Multigenerational parenting is a latent symptom of inappropriate weaning.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Culture pg. 108), Topics: Children, Independence: “Dependence is taught. Children naturally seek independence. They want to investigate interesting things…while seniors are more receptive of the status quo….”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 124), Topics: School System: “The school system is a legal entity managing divisions of labor.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 124), Topics: School System, Technology: “The school system is an apprentice system like Luddites rejecting woolen mill labor-economizing technology in the early 1800s….”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Culture pg. 217), Topics: School System, Technology: “Without (Franklin’s) constant supply of electricity, (Edison’s) artificial memory systems, (Franklin’s) electoral storage batteries, German physicist Heinrich Hertz’ (1857-1894) transmission of electromagnetic radio waves in 1887, and (Edison’s) telephone carbon microphone transmitter, today’s cellular smartphones would not exist. Sure there are new models of cellular phones and electronic gadgets appearing monthly, but it is a huge stretch to call them novel compared to their fundamental base of innovative technology. Those born in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s before ‘school system’ showed up in the dictionary built mechanisms for manned space movement…(for) Russia’s Yuri Gagarin’s first journey into outer space April 12, 1961, until July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon…. It was a race of imagination that put education to the test and technology to use.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Culture pg. 252), Topics: Schools, Technology: “If you are a pessimist…in a technology-savvier world, schools into the mid-twenty-first century will continue to follow custom while struggling to remain relevant. When uniformity becomes standard, originality perishes. Minds become translucent. Memory dwindles. Snippets remain undeveloped. Gadgets will be expected to answer problems although minds are not conditioned to properly synthesize input or output.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 70-71), Topics: Attention span, Technology : Attention span matters. The longer an idea or project is metabolized in the brain, the longer the brain has to develop multiple solutions. Albert Einstein, for example, contemplated his theory of gravitation from 1907 to 1915 and published a paper on it in June 1916. It took scientists a century (February 11, 2016) to confirm Einstein’s gravitational wave theory…. The old axiom ‘sleep on it’ allows at least a day of contemplation, whereas today’s electronic flash media of emails, cellphone texts, video games, and social media elicit immediate thoughts, if not responses. Long-term attention to matters is waning.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 123), Topics: Education, Technophobia: “In the history of man, divergence of educated people and technology has never been so wide and is widening.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 384), Topics: Risk, Teams: “Business and political leaders have gained power through minimizing risks generally through capitulation to social vagabonds, and acceptance of team concepts—the ultimate risk aversion system.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 384), Topics: Risk, Teachers: “Teachers, both men and women, avoid risk by taking a job that minimizes it…. Systems (i.e. school systems) that minimize risk are also training our young to minimize risk. Multigenerations have developed in school systems training the young (from age four to at least eighteen) to minimize risk.”

Wietgrefe, Gary (Learning pg. 124), Topics: Technology, Labor: “In the history of the world, technology advancement has been in a constant battle against labor unwilling to change to more efficient systems. Into the twenty-first century, those with the most education are the most likely to resist technology.”

Winters, Janet Lewis (Learning pg. 368), Topics: School: “…(As) a classmate of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Earnest Hemingway… On May 8, 1952 Winters wrote… ‘What does one learn about writing in high school? You are lucky if you’re not taught to write badly.’”

Xun Kaung (Culture pg. 179), Topics: Learn, Teach: (paraphrased from 312-230 B.C.) “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”