God made His world to work
for human benefit.
Find out why by watching our Truth in Two (full text below).
Support MarkEckel.com (here). Find the MarkEckel.com YouTube Channel (here). Mark is President of The Comenius Institute (website). Dr. Eckel spends time with Christian young people in public university (1 minute video), teaching at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis, and interprets culture from a Christian vantage point (1 minute video). Consider becoming a Comenius patron (here).
Pictures: Josh Collingwood, SnappyGoat
FULL TEXT
I have 169 mantras, statements my students have heard over and over from me in the classroom through my forty years of teaching. A mantra is just that – a repetitious statement. But a mantra is more than that. The word literally means “an instrument of thought.” Because I believe repetition is the mother of education, I use repetitive ideas because they stick in students’ minds.
But repetition by itself is not education. One also needs common sense. The phrase has come to mean the practice of right judgment in practical matters. But the phrase assumes two basic ideas. “Sense” is wisdom, a deep grounding in discernment; some might say a sensible person is quite perceptive or understanding. The individual then applies the accumulated insights from life to particular concerns. “Common” takes for granted that there is an assumed thinking for all people, places, times, and cultures. A universal ideal exists which is then applied in some local reality.
When we say a person has “common sense” we generally mean they are taking the best of what they have studied about humanity and human relations, then using it to make a decision. Hebraic-Christian thinking suggests that “common sense” is Wisdom embedded in world for the benefit of all humanity. According to Proverbs 8,
Wisdom “walks in the way of righteousness and the path of justice.”
We make sense of what is common from One who has our best interests at heart.
If you want to know more about my 169 educational mantras follow the link in this Truth in Two. And there are multiple links to teachings on biblical wisdom as well. It is common sense, the wisdom of God’s embedded truths in creation, that supplies the content for my communication, that allows ideas to stick in student’s minds. For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, President of the Comenius Institute, personally seeking truth wherever it’s found.
Good post.