Tag: education

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.

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.