I'm a big fan of highbrow Cliff Notes. For example, Kant's famous metaphysical treatise is called
Critique of Pure Reason; I eventually had to read it for an upper-level course on Kant, but in 101, we read his much shorter Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, which was, our intro professor explained to us, Kant's own summary presentation of his longer work.

These days, I'm reading H.G. Wells's A Short History of the World, which is the summary version of his two-volume Outline of History.

In both cases, the author wrote his own summary. I couldn't hope for an equivalent with the Bible — which I've started several times but never made it out of Genesis — so instead I'm reading and enjoying David Plotz's "Blogging the Bible," from Slate.com.

As they come up, I'm also keeping track of famous saying I didn't realize were biblical in origin, some of which have been reworded in their popular form, such as, "Can the Cushite change his skin or the leopard his spots?" (Jeremiah 13:23). I guess the Bible isn't very politically correct.

Here's Plotz's introductory comment to Jeremiah chapters 14–16:

Anyone who's ever been in a bad relationship knows the Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Cruelty: Before you go through the torture of dumping a boyfriend, you act meaner than you feel toward him. (This usually goes on at an unconscious level.) Boyfriend understandably bristles and retaliates. This makes the actual leave-taking much easier. You get to lighten your own guilt by blaming the dumpee for being such a jerk.

This appears to be God's strategy.

My father used to lament the lack of biblical literacy in my so-called education. For most of my life, I haven't shared his regret. But that concept alone — the doctrine of preemptive cruelty (which yes, I suppose might be more Plotz's than God's) — would have been well worth knowing in my formative years. My teens and 20's would have looked very different if I'd known it.

"I have concluded that history in my own public school education was little more than a chronological sequence of political campaign slogans, punctuated by the odd war."

– David Bratton

"There are decent public schools and terrible ones," writes Lew Rockwell, "so there is no use generalizing. Nor is there a need to trot out data on test scores. Let me just deal with economics. All studies have shown that average cost per pupil for public schools is twice that of private schools. If we could abolish public schools and compulsory schooling laws, and replace it all with market-provided education, we would have better schools at half the price, and be freer too. We would also be a more just society, with only the customers of education bearing the costs." FULL ARTICLE

Free Resource (#514) - March 11th, 2008

Today's Resource of the Day

Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity

In this book forum from the Cato Institute, John Stossel (Co-Anchor of ABC's 20/20) discusses his latest book Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel—Why Everything You Know is Wrong. In his entertaining, no-nonsense style Stossel advocates opening up K-12 education to the free markets because he feels American public schools are falling behind the rest of the world and competition would give school systems the necessary kick they need to get America's schools back on top. This audio program is available on MP3 download as well as streaming audio from the Cato Institute and streaming video from FORA.tv.

Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity

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Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity

Consumer advocate, investigative reporter, and bestselling author Stossel is back with a new audiobook based on his top-rated "20/20" segment, which debunks popularly reported misconceptions.

Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity

Just discovered:

The Engines of Our Ingenuity is a radio program that tells the story of how our culture is formed by human creativity. Written and hosted by John Lienhard, it is heard nationally on Public Radio and produced by KUHF-FM Houston. Among other features, this web site houses the transcripts for every episode heard since the show's inception in 1988. Click here for the newest Engines episode, No. 2342. Recent Engines episodes are now available as a Podcast. Click Here. Each individual episode begins with a link to its audio version.

Also available through iTunes U.

A classic Calvin & Hobbes, forwarded by Mr B:

I learned a lot during the first 35 years of my life. I've spent most of the past 5 years doing a lot of unlearning.

Here's a historical corrective worth passing along:

On January 26, 1893, Abner Doubleday died in Mendham, New Jersey. In 1905, Albert J. Spalding, a former player turned sporting goods manufacturer, established a commission to investigate the origins of baseball. After two years of questionable study (and primarily on the basis of unsubstantiated testimony from an elderly man of doubtful sanity), the commission concluded that Abner Doubleday formulated the essential rules of baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York (the current home of the Baseball Hall of Fame). Even though scholars have totally discredited the claim (Doubleday's own obituary says he disliked outdoor sports), the myth lives on. In his 1973 book "The Man Who Invented Baseball," Harold Peterson expressed it all in a beautiful example of chiasmus:

"Abner Doubleday didn't invent baseball,
baseball invented Abner Doubleday."

That's from the weekly newsletter I get from www.DrMardy.com, a website "for lovers of wit and wordplay," which was recommended to me by a lover of chiasmus.

From MaybeLogic.com:

Pranks and Prankster, Tricksters & Tricks (with R.U. Sirius
6 week course from February 4 – March 16) -- the brilliant ones open up a space in the world for magic(k), ambiguity, and novelty. They encourage us to Question Authority and better still, they cause us to Question Reality.

In this course, we will discuss the history of pranks and pranksterism in the contemporary world. We will examine mythical and world historic tricksters like Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Crowley, Puck, Heyoka, Papa Legba, Lucifer, and more. And we'll explore and discuss the role pranksters and tricksters play in cultures. I will also discuss some of my own pranks and tricks and try to get some of my more legendary prankster friends in for interviews.

Finally, we will plan pranks, make pranks, and maybe even leave the course with a dedicated prankster cabal. No fooling.

Course texts:

• Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art by Lewis Hyde
• Pranks 2 by V. Vale

Price: $135.00

From the Advocates for Self-Government:

Education: Too Important to Be Left to the Government

Jeff Jacoby, award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe, has written another wonderfully devastating column calling for the separation of school and state. And, as previously, he cuts through to the essence of the issue.

Here are some excerpts:

Americans differ on same-sex marriage and evolution, on the importance of sports and the value of phonics, on the right to bear arms and the reverence due the Confederate flag. Some parents are committed secularists; others are devout believers. Some place great emphasis on math and science; others stress history and foreign languages.

"Free men and women do not entrust to the state the molding of their children's minds and character."

Americans hold disparate opinions on everything from the truth of the Bible to the meaning of the First Amendment, from the usefulness of rote memorization to the importance of teaching music and art. With parents so often in loud disagreement, why should children be locked into a one-size-fits-all, government-knows-best model of education?

Nobody would want the government to run 90 percent of the nation's entertainment industry. Nobody thinks that 90 percent of all housing should be owned by the state. Yet the government's control of 90 percent of the nation's schools leaves most Americans strangely unconcerned….

In a society founded on political and economic liberty, government schools have no place. Free men and women do not entrust to the state the molding of their children's minds and character. As we wouldn't trust the state to feed our kids, or to clothe them, or to get them to bed on time, neither should we trust the state to teach them….

Education is too important to be left to the government.

Jacoby, it should be noted, is one of the most influential columnists in America. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe is the largest newspaper in the New England area, and the 15th largest-circulation newspaper in America, with over 600,000 readers. His column is carried by other publications as well, and widely disseminated on the Web.

Source: "Big Brother at School," by Jeff Jacoby

From Scott Lahti:

Parts of the essay below from Monday's New York Times on the civic and cultural virtues of learning Latin, by English journalist Harry Mount (son of Ferdinand Mount, novelist of manners and former editor, 1991–2003, of The Times Literary Supplement) —

But what they gain is a glimpse into the past that provides a fuller, richer view of the present. Know Latin and you discern the Roman layer that lies beneath the skin of the Western world. And you open up 500 years of Western literature (plus an additional thousand years of Latin prose and poetry) …

With a little Roman history and Latin under your belt, you end up seeing more everywhere, not only in literature and language, but in the classical roots of Federal architecture; the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe and, in turn, America; and in the American system of senatorial government. The novelist Alan Hollinghurst describes people who know history's turning points as being able to look at the world as a sequence of rooms: Greece gives way to Rome, Rome to the Byzantine Empire, to the Renaissance, to the British Empire, to America….

put one in mind at once of a passage by Albert Jay Nock from The Theory of Education in the United States :

We may admit, I presume, the disciplinary value of these studies, since that has never been seriously disputed, so far as I know, but we may say a word, perhaps, about their formative character. The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest and fullest continuous record available to us, of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity — every department, I think, except one: music. This record covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years of the human mind's operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, politics, medicine, theology, geography, everything. Hence the mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disciplined mind but an experienced mind — a mind that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage point of an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty experience of the human spirit's operations. If I may paraphrase the words of Emerson, this discipline brings us into the feeling of an immense longevity, and maintains us in it. You may perceive at once, I think, how different would be the view of contemporary men and things, how different the appraisal of them, the scale of values employed in their measurement, on the part of one who has undergone this discipline and on the part of one who has not. These studies, then, in a word, were regarded as formative because they are maturing, because they powerfully inculcate the views of life and the demands on life that are appropriate to maturity and that are indeed the specific marks, the outward and visible signs, of the inward and spiritual grace of maturity. And now we are in a position to observe that the establishment of these views and the direction of these demands is what is traditionally meant, and what we citizens of the republic of letters now mean, by the word "education"; and the constant aim at inculcation of these views and demands is what we know under the name of the Great Tradition of our republic.

[Read the rest »]

LearnOutLoud.com's Free Resource #451 is Ted Kennedy's eulogy for Bobby Kennedy. No thanks.

But before I delete the email, I notice the last line: "This speech is available from American Rhetoric on MP3 download." I thought "American Rhetoric" sounded like an interesting website, so I went to www.AmericanRhetoric.com to look around. Lincoln, FDR, MLK … more "no thanks."

But they also have this incredible section called "Rhetorical Figures in Sound":

Rhetorical Figures in Sound is a compendium of 200+ brief audio (mp3) clips illustrating 40 different figures of speech. Most of these figures were constructed, identified, and classified by Greek and Roman teachers of rhetoric in the Classical period. For each rhetorical device, definitions and examples, written and audio, are provided. Audio examples are taken from public speeches and sermons, movies, songs, lectures, oral interpretations of literature, and other media events. Some artifacts have been edited further to make the devices easier to detect. In the interest of diversity, I have included a range of voices and perspectives.

Figures, Definitions, Audio Illustrations

Alliteration	Allusion	Anadiplosis	Analogy
Anaphora	Anesis	Antimetabole	Antithesis
Aposiopesis	Appositio	Assonance	Asyndeton
Catachresis	Climax	Conduplicatio	Diacope
Distinctio	Enthymeme	Enumeratio	Epanalepsis
Epistrophe	Epitheton	Epizeuxis	Euphemismos
Exemplum	Expletive	Hyperbole	Hypophora
Metaphor	Oxymoron	Paradox	Parallelism
Personification	Polysyndeton	Rhetorical Question	Scesis Onomaton
Sententia	Simile	Symploce	Synecdoche

Rhetoric, by the way, is the highest stage of the trivium of classical education (after grammar and logic). In the system we're considering for homeschooling (The Well-Trained Mind), each stage takes 4 years, so that the grammar stage maps pretty directly to "grammar school," logic to middle school, and rhetoric to high school. I won't go into any details here; that summary should be enough of a launchpad for your own investigations, if you don't already know what I'm talking about. I mention it only to give context to my saying that this website looks like a wonderful resource for classical homeschoolers.

My friend Carolyn pointed me to this:

Sesame Street is now brought to you by the letter P and the letter C — for political correctness, that is.

The fun police have slapped an "adults only" warning on a new DVD of classic episodes, which featured a world in which children played in the street, a monster gorged on cookies and a bad-tempered puppet lived in a bin.

The episodes, made between 1969 and 1974, have been released in the US with the caution: "These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grown-ups and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child."

[keep reading]

N.b.: "Andrew Fuller, a clinical psychologist and consultant on children's television production, said a sanitised world was far more dangerous than the whacky world of Sesame Street."

From my friend AC:

"In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." – Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)

He found that quote here.

$17 "There is no possible compromise with an unsound theory; nature always steps in and exacts her penalty."

"Perhaps we are not fully aware of the extent to which instruction and education are accepted as being essentially the same thing."

"The doctrine of equality has regularly been degraded into a kind of charter for rabid self-assertion on the part of ignorance and vulgarity."

"Is it not clear that the whole difficulty lies with the theory upon which we are trying to erect a workable system?"

"The philosophical doctrine of equality gives no more ground for the assumption that all men are educable than it does for the assumption that all men are 6 feet tall."

"As far as I know, there does not exist a university or an undergraduate college, in the traditional and proper sense, anywhere in the country."

From FEE:

The Goal Is Freedom: Ersatz School Choice
11/9/2007
"Vouchers go down in crushing defeat" That headline thundered from Wednesday's Salt Lake City Tribune, as it announced that more than 60 percent of Utahans who voted on whether to uphold the statewide school-voucher program said no. It was a big setback for the voucher movement. The Utah legislature had approved the program by one vote. But the teachers' union, which opposes vouchers, gathered enough signatures to put the question to the voters. It poured a ton of money into its successful effort to have the people veto the law. This was the tenth time in over 30 years that voters have defeated school vouchers or education tax credits, says the National School Boards Association. It may not look like a win for the cause of educational freedom, but in the long run it might be. That depends on what we do about it. More…

A NEW article by Sheldon Richman

LvMI just put up a free PDF copy of The Theory of Education in the United States, by Albert Jay Nock.

I've been wanting to read this one for a while, a collection of lectures given at the University of Virginia, just on the other side of town.

I've only just started the book, but already I've found one passage laugh-out-loud funny:

A few months ago, an Italian nobleman, one of the most accomplished men in Europe, told me that he had had a curious experience in our country; he wondered whether I had made anything like the same observation, and if so, how I accounted for it. He said he had been in America several times, and had met some very well-educated men, as an Italian would understand the term; but they were all in the neighborhood of sixty years old. Under that age, he said, he had happened upon no one who impressed him as at all well-educated.

I told him that he had been observing the remnant of a pre-revolutionary product, and coming from a country that had had the Sicilian Vespers and Rienzi and Masaniello and now Mussolini, he should easily understand what that meant; that our educational system had been thoroughly reorganized, both in spirit and structure, about thirty-five years ago, and that his well-educated men of sixty or so were merely holdovers from what we now put down, by general consent, as the times of ignorance — holdovers from pre-Fascist days, if I might borrow the comparison.

"But," I went on, "our younger men are really very keen; they are men of parts, and our schools and universities do an immense deal for them. Just try to come round one of them about the merits of a bond-issue or a motor-car, the fine points of commercial cake-icing or retail shoe merchandising, or the problems of waste motion involved in bricklaying or in washing dishes for a hotel, and you are sure to find that he will give a first-rate account of himself, and that he reflects credit on the educational system that turned him out."

My friend looked at me a moment in a vacant kind of way, and presently said that proficiency in these pursuits was not precisely what he had in mind when he spoke of education.

"Just so," I replied, "but it is very much what we have in mind. We are all for being practical in education. Do you know, it would not surprise me in the least to find that our Russian friends had taken a leaf out of our book in designing their Five-Year Plan?"

He looked at me again for a moment, and changed the subject. I thought of explaining myself, but saw it would be of no use; my little pleasantry had been dashed to pieces against the solid adamant of his patrician seriousness.