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!
First, I would like to thank the extremely generous – and by their own preference, anonymous – donors
who very graciously donated an entire YEAR of Castalia Library to SIXSEVEN 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.
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.
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.
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.
Laurie Bluedorn, a great champion of homeschooling and the author of the highly influential instructional book Teaching the Trivium: Christian Homeschooling in a Classical Style, died this morning. She was a model of the defender of Christian civilization that we would all do well to aspire to be.
Given that technology and homeschooling have already rendered the public schools totally obsolete from an actual education standpoint, one can’t help but wonder if one of the side-benefits of pushing the lockdown measures in response to Corona-chan is killing the public schools once and for all.
The shutdown of schools across America, both public and private, has thrown the lives of parents into an upside-down struggle. And now, in the name of safety, the Centers for Disease Control are nearly guaranteeing the destruction of public schools in the United States.
They don’t mean to, of course. After all, public schools are the government-run and government-approved schools. But right now, every single parent across America is homeschooling. We are all getting a look at the shortcomings of curriculum, bureaucracy, and the people involved. While some teachers have risen to the occasion and tried their absolute hardest to attend to the educational and mental well-being of their students, there are some teachers who are just mailing it in. And there are kids and families that are mailing it in as well. The situation, as it stands right now, is not a sustainable one….
At the rate the districts and the CDC are going, the only kids left in public school will be the kids whose parents can’t afford to get them a private tutor/governess, the kids whose parents are not involved to begin with, the kids whose parents need the public school for childcare/meal purposes, and special education kids. And if you think teachers’ unions were down on homeschooling before, wait until public school enrollment drops nationwide and districts start losing real money over decreased enrollment. The best part? The unions will have no one to blame but their local government. The longer the school shutdown continues, the more parents are going to make other plans. Public education in the United States may have been unintentionally killed by government.
Taking a short term economic hit that was inevitable anyway thanks to the debt situation is a very small price to pay for killing the two primary engines of evil propaganda in the USA. And Corona-chan hasn’t exactly been good for the media or Hollywood either.
With time growing short and the future uncertain, many high school students are considering skipping college in the fall.
The coronavirus pandemic has left many universities uncertain whether they’ll be able to welcome students to campus after summer, and many students don’t want to pay for top-flight universities if they can’t get the full in-person experience.
Some say they may skip a year. Some may opt for cheaper alternatives like community colleges. Either way, the coronavirus could leave its mark on higher education long after the pandemic fades.
Most colleges haven’t decided yet what to do about the fall, said Brian Eufinger, of Edison Prep, an SAT tutoring service and college admissions expert in Atlanta. “The closer we get to the Fourth of July they’ll have to say yay or nay,” he said.
As some students decline to attend, some schools are combing through their wait lists to fill enrollment vacancies. Eufinger said he has seen students “come off of wait lists at top schools — schools that typically don’t pull from wait lists — so that tells me their overall deposit numbers are lower.”
A university degree is a fraudulent debt-inflated rip-off. The more the demand for these unnecessary pieces of paper falls, the better off society will be. Talk to a recent college graduate. Whatever it is that they are receiving in exchange for their tens of thousands of debt-financed dollars, it isn’t an education.
All the schools and universities in Italy are closed until the Ides of March:
Scuole e università chiuse per coronavirus in tutta Italia dal 5 al 15 marzo.
I can’t even imagine how happy this would have made me as a kid…. In considerably more important news, Serie A will continue, but the games will be played a porte chiuse, which is to say, in empty stadiums.
