If you want a free society, teach your children what oppression tastes like. Tell them how many miracles it takes to get from here to there. Above all, encourage them to ask questions. Teach them to think for themselves.
Interpretation
Teaching children about oppression and critical thinking is essential for a free society.
In this quote, Jonathan Sacks emphasizes the importance of educating the younger generation not only about the harsh realities of oppression but also about the value of miracles and progress in achieving freedom. By encouraging children to think critically and ask questions, we prepare them to understand their responsibilities and the importance of safeguarding liberties in a society.
In practice
In a community meeting about educational reform, you could cite this quote to advocate for teaching critical thinking skills.
Stabilizing the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.
Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.
Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.
Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals.
Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.
If there is anything for which I would go back to childhood, and live this weary life over again, it is for the burning, exalting, transporting thrill and ecstasy with which the young faculties hold their earliest communion with knowledge.
When you're interviewing someone, you're in control. When you're being interviewed, you think you're in control, but you're not.
Now...in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, ipods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education.
Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
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