Tag: education

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.

Asian immigrants are rapidly learning how the U.S. imperial system actually operates:

A Howard County, Maryland, school board voted Thursday to implement a busing initiative opposed by the vast majority of the public. Board members took one of the “no” voters into a back room after an initial vote failed. She changed her vote when she reemerged.

Board member Kirsten Coombs voted “no” after board member Jennifer Mallo motioned to move a swath of children out of their schools to try to balance poverty rates. It failed 4-3, and people clapped. “I move that we go into recess to consider the impact of the failure of that last motion,” Mallo said.

Coombs appeared to be crying when they came out of the back room and said the board should vote again “because otherwise the entire plan falls apart.”

The board redid the vote, with Coombs’ voice cracking as she said “yes.” The vote was part of a series taken by the board that, together, resulted in the large-scale moving of children to different schools based on their parents’ income, effective in 2020.

Residents of the center-left county are in shock that the board passed a busing plan will move about 5,300 children from their neighborhood schools to balance poverty, despite almost unanimous opposition in the testimony the board heard, and the school system’s own data showing no connection between equal demographics of schools and more equal performance of demographic groups.

Asian cultures have a strong tendency to take things at face value. That’s why Asian immigrants are so shocked when they discover that the Ivy League admissions offices are not genuinely meritocratic, that Hollywood entertainment does not reliably represent U.S. demographics, and that their elected representatives have absolutely no intention of representing the actual interests of their constituencies.

Ming Du wrote to Mallo: “It was a sad day, Ms. Mallo, a very sad day — you have completely repainted the image for the elected officials in a democratic society. I’ve never felt so belittled in front of a government official in America, and I was stunned to hear you rebuking your constituents, a scene I have not seen ever since I left the tyrannic China 26 years ago. … I thought America is different, until Nov 7, 2019.”

The U.S.A. is not any different than any other empire. The entire “land of the free” narrative is an unmitigated lie. The U.S.A. ceased to be a voluntary association in 1865, it ceased to be American in 1913, and it ceased to be European in 1965.

With 15 days left, the Junior Classics campaign is now at 1015 percent of goal. Are you tired of winning yet?

News of the availability of the 2020 Junior Classics is has observably spread as far as Australia and Hong Kong. If you are similarly interested in acquiring one of the greatest homeschooling assets ever printed, whether in digital, hardcover, or deluxe leather editions, you can do so here.
The campaign owner is aware that the campaign cannot be found by searching for it on Google or the crowdfunding site. That is by design, so there is no need to repeatedly inform us of that fact. If you wish to help spread the news about the , please feel free to post the animated GIF above with a direct link to the campaign attached. And thanks very much to the Classics backer who created the banner.
In other crowdfunding news, we are aware of about 500 AH Vol. I omnibuses that have not yet shipped due to a problem with the order formatting. We are in the process of fixing that with the printer, so if you have not yet received your omnibus, just sit tight, as this is just a minor procedural problem.
UPDATE: The Heirloom perk is intentionally priced higher than the sum of its parts because certain backers have requested a means of providing additional support to the project.
UPDATE: Both the leather and the case-laminated hardcover editions are printed on acid-free paper that meets the ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 standards for archival quality paper.

The God-Emperor sets a few veterans free from the debt-vampires:

President Trump has announced a policy directive to the U.S. Department of Education to immediately facilitate the discharge of federal student loan debt for any veteran permanently disabled as part of their military service.

It’s a good start. The non-disabled vets should be next, followed by the unemployed. All student loan debt should be eventually discharged and all student loans should forbidden by state and federal law. They are intrinsically predatory and accomplish nothing except inflating the cost of higher education.

President Trump needs to get out in front of this issue in a big way. It is a definite election-winner:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., will propose on Monday eliminating all $1.6 trillion of student debt held in the United States, a significant escalation of the policy fight in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary two days before the candidates’ first debate in Miami.

Sanders is proposing that the federal government pay to wipe clean the student debt held by 45 million Americans – including all private and graduate school debt – as part of a package that also would make public universities, community colleges and trade schools tuition-free.

Sanders is proposing to pay for these plans with a tax on Wall Street his campaign says will raise more than $2 trillion over 10 years, though some tax experts give lower revenue estimates.

Sanders will be joined Monday by Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who will introduce legislation in the House to eliminate all student debt in the United States, as well as Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., co-chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who has championed legislation to make public universities tuition-free.

Politics aside, eliminating student debt is the right thing to do. The power of the banks needs to be broken and this is the most effective way to begin doing that. Student loan debt is intrinsically predatory and cannot be justified, especially in light of the massive endowments of the elite universities.

The fact is that most people should not go to college. But if corporations are going to demand worthless pieces of paper for a job, then those worthless pieces of paper should be provided to everyone who wants one for free.

Remember, periodic debt forgiveness is straight out of the Bible and is even referenced in the Lord’s Prayer. Debtors must be forgiven, concerns about fairness notwithstanding.

Unauthorized Professor Rachel Fulton Brown defends the Middle Ages:

We medievalists all know the drill.

Somebody in public life says something disparaging about the Middle Ages, and we all leap in to insist that either:

  a) Europe in the Middle Ages was actually much more advanced/enlightened/sophisticated than the off-hand comment about people believing the world was flat suggests, or

  b) yes, absolutely, they’re right, medieval Christians were murderous thugs, barbarians of the first order who knew nothing of tolerance or diversity and probably ate babies for breakfast whenever they could get them.

Neither answer ever changes the public conversation one iota because everybody knows that whatever Charles Homer Haskins might try to insist about the real Renaissance happening in the twelfth century, there is no getting round the Albigensian Crusade and the massacres of the Jews in the Rhineland (the former called by the pope, the latter resisted by all the bishops and other leaders of the Church).

The more those of us who study the intellectual, institutional, and spiritual achievements of the period succeed in pointing to the great depth and complexity of the Christian tradition (including its criticisms of the very kinds of violence so often cited as paradigmatic of the Dark Ages), the more our colleagues who study the massacres and inquisitions reinforce the prevailing sense of the period as benighted and savage, and we are right back where we started, blaming Europe and its colonial offspring for all the woes in the world.

Our Enlightened and liberal predecessors would say we’ve been doing it wrong.

This is the blog attached to the coming Unauthorized course on medieval history, so if you’re interested in it, be sure to bookmark it.

The Great Enstupidation of the United States proceeds apace:

When Yale recently decided to relocate three-quarters of the books in its undergraduate library to create more study space, the students loudly protested. In a passionate op-ed in the Yale Daily News, one student accused the university librarian—who oversees 15 million books in Yale’s extensive library system—of failing to “understand the crucial relationship of books to education.” A sit-in, or rather a “browse-in,” was held in Bass Library to show the administration how college students still value the presence of books. Eventually the number of volumes that would remain was expanded, at the cost of reducing the number of proposed additional seats in a busy central location.

Little-noticed in this minor skirmish over the future of the library was a much bigger story about the changing relationship between college students and books. Buried in a slide deck about circulation statistics from Yale’s library was an unsettling fact: There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade.

Yale’s experience is not at all unique—indeed, it is commonplace. University libraries across the country, and around the world, are seeing steady, and in many cases precipitous, declines in the use of the books on their shelves. The University of Virginia, one of our great public universities and an institution that openly shares detailed library circulation stats from the prior 20 years, is a good case study. College students at UVA checked out 238,000 books during the school year a decade ago; last year, that number had shrunk to just 60,000.

One can make a very good case for outlawing so-called “higher education” now, as the Christian university created to educate young men has now devolved into a worse-than-useless factory for transforming young women into barren SJW debt-slaves.