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.
The gentle reader may recall how once I waxed eloquent in lauding sloth, a vice that has done much to save Greek antiquities in Sicily. Vandalized in Greece by energetic locals, who routinely used the marble to build their rustic hovels, in Sicily these noble structures have survived largely intact for the simple reason that our peasants were too indolent to steal. That, anyway, was my working theory. More broadly, sloth is one of the few things that stand between man and the picture of man portrayed by Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. Always scheming, always inventing, always eager to...
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.
Perhaps it is only now, towards the end of 2020, that some of us are beginning to see this year as the best one in recent memory, perhaps in our entire lives. But that’s only possible if you’ve really been reflecting on what is truly going on this year and you’ve taken the time to diligently compare perception with reality.
On this website, four years ago I warned Trump about hiring these retread generals, including Gen. John Kelly, who as chief of staff sabotaged the president. The only one who turned out to be loyal to Trump’s policy of implementing a needed change in foreign and defense policy was Gen. Michael Flynn – who was prosecuted until the recent pardon.
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.
A haunting image was making the newspaper round the other week, which I am certain the gentle reader, if only out of a corner of his eye, has noted, perhaps even musing to himself that one of these days this photograph would get a mention in Wednesday’s Child.
