HOGWARTS — Headmaster Albus Dumbledore admitted he was beginning to question the sensibility of having an entire house of students named after an evil snake that's dedicated to perpetuating racist ideas and destroying Hogwarts.

"The powers working within children—this was Maria Montessori’s discovery. She discovered a hidden power in children of an intense motivation to perceive reality. 

    "This power begins in infancy with basic sense perception; an infant exerting effort to see things clearly. Then it becomes a toddler’s extraordinary effort to coordinate his movements to perform basic tasks. . . . Later, this power becomes a three-year old revisiting the trinomial cube over and over again across a span of many weeks to achieve mastery. . . . 

    "Throughout these examples we see a strong motivation to perceive, which is a power residing in the soul of every child. And the Montessori materials are inventions which tap into this motivation and unleash this power.“

~ Mike Gustafson from his post 'The Rocket Ship of the Human Spirit.' Hat tip Carrie-Ann Biondi who notes Gustafson’s emboldened point "reminds me of the beautiful opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Joe Sachs’s trans.): “All humans by nature stretch themselves out toward understanding."

 

"Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, was the guardian of the city [of Athens], and she had offered it the gift of the olive tree. Since it takes many years for olive trees to bear plenty of fruit, the planting of so many olive trees in Athens indicates that people had hope for the future and they had found ways to feed themselves until then.
    "This is also the reason why the olive branch became a symbol for peace. If it takes two decades for your trees to bear a substantial harvest, you are extra vulnerable to warfare that might wipe out all your investments in one moment. Therefore olive growers usually insisted on negotiations and reconciliation when city-states were at each other's throats, and the olive came to symbolise both commerce and peace."

~ Johan Norberg on free trade as a powerful palliative for conflict and war. From his book Peak Human: What We Can Learn From the Rise dnd Fall of Golden Ages [hat tip Tony Morley]