For several decades I have plagued teachers and school principals with a few basic questions, without finding anyone of them who could give a reasonable answer. Until these questions are seriously addressed, there can be no significant improvement in education. It is not as if they are trick questions. They are the kind of queries that would be made of any human activity that absorbs to much time, energy, and resources.
There is an interesting FB discussion going on over a post by Carl Jones on the question of capitalism. I would suggest that people who use terms like free market and capitalism begin by understanding the literal meaning of the words they are using.
It is not bad. Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
The chorus is, as we say in psychobabble slang, into denial and don’t want to talk about Ajax’s impending suicide. Instead, after complaints about life in the field outside Troy, their thoughts carry them back to their home on the island of Salamis.
We live in a culture gone mad on theory: theories of sex and family, theories of government, and, inevitably, theories of education. A debate has raged for centuries over “the future of education.” Early American liberals like Noah Webster insisted that a democratic society needed a suitable educational system, divorced from the classical tradition that encouraged aristocracy and elitism.
“Pollsters always lie, as we know, but apart from that, polling should be a major felony because it is based on the degrading fallacy that it is important to know what people want and that political–therefore social and moral–questions can be treated as a popularity contest.”
In this passage, dialogue between Ajax and Tecmessa, Ajax and the Chorus, Ajax and Eurysaces, the embittered hero sticks to his decision to kill himself, despite the appeals of his “wife”—she may as well be—son, and followers, all of whom depend on him. It is a bit like the Book of Job, except these are Greeks, for whom friendship—which includes kinship—is a primary moral quality.
It’s time to dry our eyes, take a deep breath, and bear our burdens cheerfully.
Athena’s parting words are to remind Odysseus and the audience that “The Gods love the sophrones and hate the kakoi. These are two key words for Greek morality and are rather more opposed than the English words “prudent” and “bad.” The man who is sophron, is he whose thinking abilities (the phrenes) are sound, who can judge the future by the past, who keeps his strong feelings under control. Sophrosyne, the great Aristotelian virtue, is a distillation of the Greek folk wisdom exemplified in the Delphic proverbs, “Nothing in excess,” “Measure is best,” and “know thyself,” which is to say, “always...
