Tag: education

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.

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.

Requiescat in pace.

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.

Best pandemic ever.

Is there nothing she can’t do? Is there no evil she can’t expose?

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.

This is an interesting story about the history of elite education trickling down to the working class in 19th century Britain:

There were many cheap mass-market series of ‘classics for the masses’ in the 19th century, and organised working-class educators made full use of them. In London, the Working Men’s College became nationally famous under Sir John Lubbock, its principal between 1883 and 1899. Lubbock drew up a list of the 100 books it was most important for a working man to read. The proportion of classical authors is remarkable: Homer, Hesiod, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Plutarch’s Lives, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Augustine’s Confessions, Plato’s Apology, Crito and Phaedo, Demosthenes’ De Corona, Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Anabasis, Cicero’s On Duties, On Friendship and On Old Age, Virgil, plays by all the tragedians, Aristophanes’ Knights and Clouds, Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus’ Germania, and Livy. In addition, two famous works on ancient history, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89) and George Grote’s A History of Greece (1846-56), make it on to the list as necessary reading for any educated person, along with the most popular novel then in existence set in antiquity, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). After 1887, the classical riches on the bookshelf of the working-class self-educator can, in large measure, be attributed to Lubbock’s ideal curriculum.

Yet the standout name in translated classics is the Everyman’s Library series, launched by Joseph Malaby Dent in 1906. Everyman’s printed 1,000 titles in its first 50 years. Forty-six are listed as ‘classical’ in genre – most standard works of Greek and philosophy, poetry and prose, from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (the first classical text released), through the dramatists and epic poets to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the 1,000th volume published.

Dent was the son of a Darlington painter-decorator who joined a Mutual Improvement Society and caught the literature bug. With his editor Ernest Rhys, he founded the Everyman label. Born into a middle-class family, Rhys began his working life as a coal engineer at Langley Park in County Durham, where he sought to enrich the lives of his co-workers. To the consternation of his conservative line manager, who considered mineworkers to be interested only in drinking and gambling, he established a library in a derelict worker’s cottage. Plato’s Republic was on the inaugural reading list.

It’s a worthy legacy. It would be excellent indeed if we were able to do something similar with Castalia; even today one can educate oneself with an Everyman’s Library. How many of us, with our expensive university diplomas, are truly as well-educated, or even as well-read, as those working men of yesteryear?

The list of Lubbock’s 100 most important books can be reviewed here. It’s interesting, as when I contemplate the 100 books selected by Franklin Library and published in the 1980s, there are considerably too many plays and more than a few books that don’t even strike me as the best book by the author. When DH Lawrence and Walt Whitman make the list while Sun Tzu and Hermann Hesse don’t, well, that just strikes me as hopelessly wrong.

The question of whether Jews are a nation or a religion has been definitively and officially settled, at least for the people of the United States:

President Trump will sign an executive order defining Judaism as a nationality, not just a religion, thus bolstering the Education Department’s efforts to stamp out “Boycott Israel” movements on college campuses.

RamZPaul reaches the obvious conclusion:

I guess this means that the United States government’s position is that Jews are not Russians, Germans, Swedes or Americans, but they are a separate nation and a separate people.

Which, of course, has always been the case, despite the various self-serving attempts by immigrants to redefine Americans as some sort of walking, talking manifestations of an ideological Platonic ideation. And, of course, it tends to raise the question of where in the Constitution the executive branch is empowered to create an “Education Department”, much less play economic and speech police for the institutions of higher education across the country.

Anyhow, it is nice to have this age-old debate resolved once and for all.

Young white men are proving that the strategy works as the small liberal arts colleges are collapsing:

The financial struggles of New England liberal arts colleges have been in the news lately. “Marlboro planning to give campus and endowment to Emerson College” describes the end of 73 years of operation in Southern Vermont. “Can small liberal arts colleges survive the next decade?” (Christian Science Monitor)

A friend who has worked at the highest levels of college governance said that these bastions of righteousness in which white males are blamed for most things are having difficulty recruiting white males. Why does that matter? “Once the men stop attending,” he noted, “then women don’t want to enroll.”

Girls want to be where the boys are. And female-dominant activities and organizations lose status in both male and female eyes. These two truisms create a dynamic that prevents stasis, but also allow for a degree of predictability based on the current level of female involvement in any activity or organization.

It also helps explain why diversity is always destructive.