Tag: education

This weekend is the last chance to order the Junior Classics Backer Edition Vols. 1-3 and to upgrade to the leather set. There will be the opportunity to purchase a leather set in the future, but no more upgrades from the hardcover sets will be available. We will leave the order pages active until midnight Sunday evening.

Now that we’ve ordered the proofs for final approval, there are only a few more days left to either a) order Vols. 1-3 of the Junior Classics hardcovers or b) preorder the 10-volume leather set before we start shipping the former. We have added a special Original Backer logo to the back of every hardcover produced in this first print run, and Original Backer’s Edition is also noted on the title page of each hardcover and leatherbound volume, as shown here. Subsequent print runs will precisely match the Original Backer’s Edition on the bookshelf, but will lack these signifiers.

Note the original artwork by Arkhaven’s Lacey Fairchild, which for Volume Three features the classic Greek tale of Hercules fighting the Hydra. It was our goal to produce the best edition of the Junior Classics to date, in terms of both aesthetics and content, and we are increasingly confident that the production team has managed to do that.

Atheists have largely come to grasp that their shiny, sexy, secular post-Christian society is never going to happen. Now it’s time for the multiculturalists to learn the same thing about their diverse, inclusive, equalitarian post-White society:

When Asian-American parents opposed the school district’s plans to enact its new “lottery” system in late October, the school district blasted the parents by stating they were “racist” and responsible for the “toxic culture” at the school. Parents were accused of furthering the “Asian supremacy” agenda by making their children work so hard; their children’s achievements were demoralizing African-American and Latino students.

One African-American parent stated it’s because of Asians hogging up all the spaces “Black people can’t catch up technologically because the ‘stupid Asians’ are keeping black people down out of fear they’d be overtaken.”

When one angry Asian-American parent responded “Trust me, you’ll never catch up. If you need to lower-standards to get in, you’ll never beat us,” a near physical fight broke loose.

Another Asian parent screamed, “First you blame white people, now you blame us!? Grow up! Study harder or go home!”

That’s the funny thing about societies. Replace the primary element, and what you end up with is something entirely different. Civic nationalism is, and always was, a lie.

This report doesn’t actually include homeschooling, but given the significantly better family outcomes that accompany Christian Protestant private schooling than either Roman Catholic private schooling or public schooling, it is quite safe to assume that homeschoolers are even more likely to end up in intact families, without experiencing either children out of wedlock or divorce:

Men and women who have been educated in a private school tend to be more likely to be married, less likely to have ever divorced, and less likely to have had a child outside of wedlock. Figure 1 displays the proportion of US adults from each school sector who are in intact marriages, have ever divorced, and have ever had a non-marital birth. All other figures in this report, like Figure 1, do not adjust for background demographic characteristics like race, ethnicity, parental education, age, and gender. Nonetheless, these patterns remain unchanged even when results are adjusted using a regression framework for demographic characteristics. Specifically,

• Adults who attended Protestant schools are more than twice as likely to be in an intact marriage as those who attended public schools. They are also about 50{5274a41d3bd2aa3d5829764fe19e8a7ecbc79c108731aad5f1ff2d292e60e2b4} less likely than public-school attendees to have a child out of wedlock.
• Among those who have ever married, Protestant-school attendees are about 60{5274a41d3bd2aa3d5829764fe19e8a7ecbc79c108731aad5f1ff2d292e60e2b4} less likely than public-school attendees to have ever divorced.
• Compared with public-school attendees, ever-married adults who attended a secular private school are about 60{5274a41d3bd2aa3d5829764fe19e8a7ecbc79c108731aad5f1ff2d292e60e2b4} less likely to have ever divorced.
• Catholic-school attendees are about 30{5274a41d3bd2aa3d5829764fe19e8a7ecbc79c108731aad5f1ff2d292e60e2b4} less likely to have had a child out of wedlock than those who attended public schools.

The results detailed in this report suggest that boys and girls who attend private schools are more likely to avoid a nonmarital birth and to get and stay married. This pattern is especially pronounced among Protestant-school attendees, which suggests that these schools are more likely to foster a kind of “Protestant Family Ethic” among their students. This is an ethic that seems especially conducive to strong and stable families.

Of particular note is the complete failure of “missionary schooling” otherwise known as “sending your kids to public school to be a light unto the benighted godless masses”. That was always a transparently absurd excuse, as children are in the public schools to be indoctrinated, not to indoctrinate. But now there are statistics demonstrating how stupid that feeble rationalization always was.

The seven families have been selected and notified about the seven donated Castalia Library subscriptions they will be receiving. Each family will receive seven Library editions, the six books included in the annual subscription plus the seventh book to complete the Plutarch pair.

33 homeschooled children and 14 parents will be the beneficiaries of these beautiful donations.

My sincere thanks to the seven incredibly generous donors. You have planted acorns, and though you may never see the trees, you will know that it is thanks to you that they grow. Well done and thank you!

who very graciously donated an entire YEAR of Castalia Library to SIX  SEVEN families. The families will be alerted by email tonight. As I mentioned when the offer was made, Castalia will be adding LIVES Vol. I by Plutarch to the donations, so each of the six families selected will receive seven deluxe books bound in topgrain cowhide. I am truly amazed by the generousness of this community and the ready willingness shown by those who with more resources to help those with less, as well as the depth of the concern demonstrated for the future generations.

These donors will never sit in the shade of the trees they are planting, but they have gone out of their way to plant intellectual acorns nevertheless. Let us hope they turn out to be mighty oaks indeed.

As subscribers know, one of these seven books will be Summa Elvetica by yours truly, Book 7 in the Library subscription and Book I in the Library/Libraria sets of Arts of Dark and Light. I’m taking this opportunity to introduce the cover of the Library edition, seen below, and to announce that it will be a) a signed edition that is b) available as a one-off purchase to non-subscribers. We’re cutting the retail price from $150 to $115 due to the high level of interest in the book, and subscribers should note that they will receive a new discount code soon in the event they wish to purchase additional copies.

We won’t know what the print run will be until the end of December, but we will keep it under 2500.

This is excellent news for the future nations of the former United States:

While parents’ satisfaction with their child’s education has fallen, there has been a five-point uptick (to 10{fb585635b9f6189e33442b25caac15ec2544d7054f182b4f92840c6cee65accd}) in the percentage of parents who say their child will be home-schooled this year.

The question defines home schooling as “not enrolled in a formal school, but taught at home” so as to clearly distinguish home schooling from distance learning provided by a school in which they are enrolled.

Public school remains the most attended type of school, although it has dropped seven points, to 76{fb585635b9f6189e33442b25caac15ec2544d7054f182b4f92840c6cee65accd}, since last year. Far fewer parents say their child is enrolled in a private school (6{fb585635b9f6189e33442b25caac15ec2544d7054f182b4f92840c6cee65accd}), charter school (5{fb585635b9f6189e33442b25caac15ec2544d7054f182b4f92840c6cee65accd}) or parochial school (2{fb585635b9f6189e33442b25caac15ec2544d7054f182b4f92840c6cee65accd}).

This is remarkable, considering that when I first started advocating homeschooling on WND, only 2 percent of students were being homeschooled. Considering that homeschooling families tend to be larger than the norm, this may indicate that as many as 12 percent of all students are being homeschooled.

With more children being homeschooled than attend private and parochial schools combined, homeschooling is the new normal.

Having completed The Divine Comedy and The Lives of the Greeks and Romans, Vol. I for Castalia Library, the production team are currently laying out the interiors of Books One, Two, and Three of the 2020 Junior Classics. This is a painstaking process, since it involves the insertion of literally hundreds of images. We’re not simply scanning the old books and putting them out there as is, which is why the process has taken so long. The objective is to ship the first three volumes in ebook and regular hardcover in time for Christmas, then ship the remaining seven in two sets as they are completed. The leather editions, however, will not be shipped until all ten are complete, then they will be bound and shipped together as a single set.

The first step was the editorial decisions concerning what stories stayed in, and what their replacements were. The second step was the collection of over a thousand public domain images, and the third step is the physical layout of the text with the images. We’ve decided to add captions to the full-page images, but not to the partial-page images, which is a minor departure from the haphazard approach of the 1958 edition, which didn’t have a rhyme or reason to the images it captioned or did not caption. The fourth and final step will be the production of the cover, which has to wait until the interior is completed in order to get the size right, and then we can send the volume to the printers.

This process has taken longer than expected thanks to Corona-chan, so we appreciate the great patience that has been shown by the campaign backers. And in answer to an oft-heard question, yes, every volume will be available to non-backers via the usual Castalia channels once they are printed and shipped to the backers, with the exception of the leather editions which will be made periodically available in limited edition sets.

That’s what the affirmative-action battle in the Ivy League is actually about:

The Department of Justice found Yale discriminates based on race and national origin in its undergraduate admissions process, and that race is the determinative factor in hundreds of admissions decisions each year. For the great majority of applicants, Asian Americans and whites have only one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials. Yale rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit.

Although the Supreme Court has held that colleges receiving federal funds may consider applicants’ race in certain limited circumstances as one of a number of factors, the Department of Justice found Yale’s use of race is anything but limited. Yale uses race at multiple steps of its admissions process resulting in a multiplied effect of race on an applicant’s likelihood of admission, and Yale racially balances its classes.

The Department of Justice has demanded Yale agree not to use race or national origin in its upcoming 2020-2021 undergraduate admissions cycle, and, if Yale proposes to consider race or national origin in future admissions cycles, it must first submit to the Department of Justice a plan demonstrating its proposal is narrowly tailored as required by law, including by identifying a date for the end of race discrimination.

The anti-white disparity is actually much worse than it appears, because Jews are classified as white by the universities and are the group most favored by the admissions offices. This battle over the educational high ground is also taking place in Hollywood and Big Tech, and the only reason the media isn’t also a battleground is because it is in complete collapse. The war between China and the Jewish diaspora for global primacy may well prove to be the most significant conflict of the 21st century.

What did Tolkien mean when he told Milton Waldman that he wanted to write “a body of more or less connected legend” that he could dedicate “to England,” sketching it in part, while leaving “scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama”? In this episode, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown talks about Tolkien’s understanding of mythology and its relationship to the country, as well as what it means to take up his invitation to participate in this story-telling, and why it is a fundamentally Christian exercise to write fan fiction within Tolkien’s legendarium.

Episode 2 of The Forge of Tolkien, A MYTHOLOGY FOR ENGLAND, is now available for subscribers on Unauthorized. You can also support the video series with a subscription.

Professor Brown introduces the lecture series on her blog, Fencing Bear at Prayer:

I first read The Lord of the Rings when I was eleven. My mother gave me the boxed set for Christmas, and I read all four books in one trip to our grandparents’ house by New Year’s. Imagine my 11-year-old self struggling with the hobbits across Middle-earth as my mother drove us across the middle of America from Kentucky to Texas (and back again), and you will get some sense of the effect that it had on me.

Of all the things that drew me to become a medieval historian, reading (and re-reading, and re-reading, and re-reading) Tolkien is at the top of the list, although it took me decades to admit it. Tolkien lived in my imagination somewhere between stories I remembered reading as a child and my first (magical) visit to England with a school trip in high school—not really real, certainly not the stuff of serious scholarship.

Latin and Chartres drew me to study the history of medieval Christianity, not elves, hobbits and dwarves.

Or so I told myself.

That very boxed set was my favorite Christmas present too, after I was introduced to The Lord of the Rings at a similar age.