Notes
posted 11 / 9 / 2009
(via bellatoris)
Latin is worth teaching to all students, regardless of background. And in fact, despite its reputation as a language of privilege, Latin is as well suited to helping students who are struggling with literacy as it is to serving as a feather in the cap of Ivy League-bound prep-schoolers. Why? Latin helps build an English vocabulary, which is critical for students from underprivileged backgrounds. As The New York Times Magazine reported in a 2006 article about the nation’s achievement gap, children whose parents are on welfare enter school knowing half as many words as do children of professional parents. By providing a grounding in the prefixes, suffixes, and roots that serve as the building blocks for so many English words, Latin enables these disadvantaged students to catch up.— Let Them Learn Latin! - The Atlantic
Since the time of Socrates, humanists have approached the problem of man’s evil-doing (which has obviously been a problem) in a constant way. Many today assume that education offers salvation; the humanistic approach to “repairing man” is evident throughout our education establishment.
This assumption was explicit when public education was first established; the promises made on behalf of public education were spectacular. Horace Mann believed the public schools capable of eliminating nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code. […]
Consider this assumption the next time some societal problem is reported on the evening news. Say a reporter has done some investigative work on some problem—it doesn’t much matter what—anything from teen pregnancies to drug abuse. After the horrifying statistics have been cited and the heart-rending footage shown, there is a call for … what? Repentance? No, invariably the reporter will call for more education. We must have programs and more programs. We must educate our youth, our substance abusers, and anyone else who is causing any difficulties. If only our problems-causers are educated, then they will stop causing problems. The Socratic solution [that man can save himself via education] is still with us. (75)
~ Douglas Wilson in Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning
Enough already. I’m not interested in getting an education, and I don’t want my children to get educations. I want my children to be educated people. I want my kids to see that, while there are societal expectations to meet and hurdles to jump, the process of being educated has to be rooted in an internal commitment, an inner desire to face and grapple with the world. Becoming educated takes humility; getting an education just takes time and patience and money. A person who is getting an education can write a brilliant essay on Lincoln, get the desired approval, and move on and forget it. But it’s difficult to see how a person who wants to be educated could spend serious time with Lincoln and not be changed by the experience. For the former person, Lincoln is an object of study, a means to a desired end. For the latter person, Lincoln is a flawed but compelling man of unusual depth and complexity whose greatest moments can’t but affect a thinking person’s moral vision. We devote a lot to getting educations and, one way or another, educations are fairly easy to get. Striving to be educated is difficult and hard to quantify. Getting an education takes a certain number of years and doesn’t place too many demands on us after the fact. But being an educated person takes devotion and commitment and the— ~ Preston Jones, professor of history at John Brown University, in an essay (pdf) on education.
process is never completed. An education worthy of the name opens the door to depth and insight and wisdom. It’s a trek.
I have access to various online research databases (ProQuest, EBSCO, etc) through my local public library and my alma mater. This access makes many magazine subscriptions unnecessary, as most of what I read is accessible online at the same time or shortly after the print version releases. But it’s a pain to log in regularly and manually pull every article from every periodical I want to read. I would love to write a script or program or something that could automate this.
Any ideas on how to do that?
singlemomblog:jeffmiller:bowlingalleylawyer:
I’d like to chime in on this argument. I think I have a pretty good perspective on things, for a few reasons. 1. I have a Kindergartner and a 2nd grader. 2. I have special needs, school age, neices and nephews. 3. I’m an adult, non-trad student at a private university. 4. I went to elementary & high school in New York and Texas. 5. I’m a Big Sister (with BBBS.org), and supervise several dozen elementary school kids a week, along with their high school thru college age Big Bros/Sisters.
1. Parental involvement is the single greatest issue in education of children in this country. Hands down, no arguments. Every public school in this country could be systematically perfect and we’d still have drop-outs, illiteracy, etc. This I can promise you. We currently live in a beautiful, upper middle class, conservative community in rural Texas. My jaw is perpetually on the floor with the things I deal with thru volunteering I do, the things going on at home, not at school. The moral and family breakdown in this country is so great, of such epic proportions, that I’m not sure any amount of “fixing” the public school system will ever change these kids lives.
2. Some teachers need to be fired. There’s really no way around that. It’s not mean, it’s just fact of matter. I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I hate to say it, but most of the unsuccessful teachers around here are elderly. Unsympathetic, out of touch, low energy, bitter, whatever you want to call it, but they need to retire already.
3. Very often… I repeat, VERY OFTEN… the problems which occur in school are based in ADMINISTRATION, and not teachers. School boards, principals, vice principals, office secretaries, etc, have given me more grief and bullshit to deal with than any amount of teachers combined. I almost NEVER hear any discussion about administrative staff when I hear about school reform.
4. “Thousands, millions of parents are unhappy with their kid’s education and want something better.” I recently heard this during an education debate. Thousands and millions of parents are IDIOTS. As a society we are spoiled, self-involved, lazy, and entitled. The second our child faces a hurdle, “we” jump to arms to tear apart whoever crossed our child’s path and can be pinpointed as “involved” in the hurdle.
So minority kids are doing better than before [according to a NYT report]. But because white kids are also doing better, and therefore the “gap” remains, the Times suggests the law is a failure. By this measure, it would have been better to pass a law that only benefits minorities than one that benefits everyone.
To be fair, closing the racial gap was one of the stated goals of No Child Left Behind. But what a strange, uncritical attitude the Times has toward the federal government when it reports with a straight face that the law is a failure because it seems to have helped children of all races, rather than observing that this calls into question whether the goal made any sense in the first place.
Evan Coyne Maloney discusses “Indoctrinate U” with Lou Dobbs (CNN, March 11th, 2009)
thoseareturkeys:fantasyaction:michaelmcgee:kari-shma
I think this should be some sort of graph which correlates chance book will be used in class to what the book will cost. Hint: the relationship is inversely proportional.
This was always infuriating to me at college. I probably bought the new edition about 50% of the time; of course, those books were inevitably the ones that did have major revisions. The first semester of my freshman year, I dutifully bought all my books in the campus bookstore—used when I could, new when I had to; about two weeks later I realized I could save a ton of money buying them online, so I re-bought everything, returned the originals to the bookstore, and saved $130. That was just one semester.
