Episode 27 of FOSIL, Education and School Libraries (recorded on Saturday 4 July 2026) is now available: Four Domains of Thought (Part 1): Ideas and Images.

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Preparatory notes

Robert A. Heinlein: “Dad claims that library science is the foundation of all sciences just as math is the key–and that we will survive or founder, depending on how well the librarians’s do their jobs.”*

Douglas Knight: The two major and unique functions of a library of any type are that it is a space for the encounter between the minds of our students and ideas [in our collections, especially non-fiction], and the extension of those ideas in the minds of our students.

Dallas Willard: “The realm of thought involves four main factors. These are ideas, images, information, and our ability to think, but the two most powerful ones are ideas and images.”

• “Ideas are very general models of our assumptions about reality. They are ways of thinking about and interpreting things.” E.g., love and leadership.
• “Closely associated with governing ideas are the images that occupy our minds. Images are always concrete or specific, as opposed to the abstractness of ideas, and are heavily laden with feeling. They frequently present themselves with the force of perception and have a powerful emotional linkage to governing idea systems. They mediate the power of those idea systems into the real situations of ordinary life.” E.g. [from revision with my son for his end-of-year Theology exam], love (Cupid, or Jesus on the cross), and leadership (Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David, or Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet by Tintoretto)
• “Without correct information (or facts), our ability to think has nothing to work on. … Lack of information results in everything from unpleasant burdens to stark tragedies.”
• Thinking “is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of given facts or assumptions. It extends the information we have and enables us to see the ‘larger picture’–to see it clearly and to see it wholly. And it undermines false or misleading ideas and images as well. It reveals their falseness to those who wish to know.”
  • “Prospering depends upon people thinking well.”
  • “Bluntly…crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil. And when the crooked thinking gets elevated into group orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, there is always, quite literally, ‘hell to pay.’ That is, hell will take its portion, as it has repeatedly done in the horrors of world history.”
  • “By ‘thoughts‘ we mean all of the ways we are conscious of things. That includes our memories, perceptions, and beliefs.”

References

• Robert A. Heinlein, Have space suit–Will travel (1975/78, p. 128).
• Douglas Knight (1921–2005), Then-President of Duke University and Chairman of the United States National Advisory Commission on Libraries. See ‘Foreword’ to Library services for the nation’s needs: Toward fulfillment of a national policy (1968), by the United States National Advisory Commission on Libraries.
• Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), French philosopher and political thinker (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). See Education at the crossroads (1943/60, Yale University Press) and The education of man (1962/67, Notre Dame University Press).
• Dallas Willard (1935–2013), Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. See The unhinging of the American mind–Derrida as pretext (1999) and Ontology of knowledge course (1997). For quotations, see ‘Transforming the mind’ in Renovation of the heart (2002, NavPress).