.

"... in Huxley's vision (Brave New World), no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one."

Amusing Ourselves to Death : Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman
page vii
Very highly recommended!
(And see also Postman's great comments on television.)

John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Federal Law
Quoted here.

Attributed to Goethe
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
page 418
(Or perhaps, "The rabble fears nothing more than intelligence.
But it is stupidity they should fear, if only they understood how fearful it is."
Quoted here)

On Liberty by J.S. Mill
-- I confess that my initial impulse is to agree with this proposition,
though my Liberal scruples immediately repudiate it.

. . . .

"Universities, even modern universities, are not in the business of maintaining security over information.
On the contrary, universities, as institutions, pre-date the "information economy" by many centuries and are not-for-profit cultural entities, whose reason for existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization, not just download data into student skulls, and the values of the academic community are strongly at odds with those of all would-be information empires. Teachers at all levels, from kindergarten up, have proven to be shameless and persistent software and data pirates. Universities do not merely "leak information" but vigorously broadcast free thought."

The Digital Underground, from
The Hacker Crackdown : Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
by Bruce Sterling
"Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use"
(or here, or here)

Robert Heinlein

"Autarky or self-sufficiency was the human ideal. It is useful to compare it to the Greek ideal of arete or all-around excellence. Odysseus, for example, exhibited arete: he could build a ship, sail it, command men, flay and roast an ox, shoot a bow, wield a spear, throw a discus, and be moved to tears by a song. He was not a specialist, but a complete man who was equal to any occasion: that is the essence of arete."

The Cynics by Tom Price

"That man (or woman), I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself."

Thomas Huxley
Aphorisms and Reflections, Reflection #89
selected by Henrietta A. Huxley
pub. 1907
Here, here, here

Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture
by Abbie Hoffman,
Norman Mailer (Introduction), Johanna Lawrenson (Afterword)
page 63

"Look to the Children of the Poor in This Season of Budget-Slashing"
by Molly Ivins
Fort Worth Star-Telegram , 24 Dec 1995
included in the book You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You

"Swingin on a Star".
Written by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen
quoted here

"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education."

Essays on Education by Alfred Whitney (Griswold)
quoted here

"An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth -- scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books -- might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repitition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?"

The Demon-Haunted World : Science As a Candle in the Dark
by Carl Sagan, page 39

Highly recommended!

Epictetus
quoted here

I think I'd have to argue that both for each individual and for society as a whole, a good education (or educational system) is the single most cost-effective investment of resources -- i.e., if we do nothing else to insure the well-being of our children, we should at least do this.

(Also: I am not a Christian, but it seems to me that attending a Jesuit-run school is likely to result in an education conspicuously better than the average.

Update: Spun off a separate page on / The Jesuit Education /)

• The Dumbing Of America
  "Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces"
  by Susan Jacoby
  Washington Post, 17 FEB 2008

  "Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism . ...
  
  According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important." ...
  
  That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation."

  
  
  
  
• In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
  by "Professor X"
  Atlantic Monthly / theatlantic.com, JUN 2008

  "A few weeks into the semester, the students must start actually writing papers, and I must start grading them. Despite my enthusiasm, despite their thoughtful nods of agreement and what I have interpreted as moments of clarity, it turns out that in many cases it has all come to naught.
  
  Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence."

  
  
  
  
• .
  .

  "Would anyone want to go to any other university, if he (sic) could get into this one ?
  ... This school exists for everybody ..."

  from "Only Adults Can Be Educated",
  Max Weismann interviews Mortimer J. Adler
  in "Philosophy is Everybody's Business:
  Journal of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas", Vol 3, No 1, 1996.

  
  
  

• Quotations About Literacy
  
  
• Fast Facts on Literacy -- from the National Institute for Literacy
  
  
• The Value of Liberal Arts
  "...a good education is one which frees (from liberal or liberate, to free) the learner." -- from Marist College
  
  
• The Quadrivium
  

  "Originally the liberal arts were seven in number. They were divided into the three-fold Trivium of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, and the four-fold Quadrivium of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. These words mean, respectively, a three-way and a four-way crossroads, implying that these paths of knowledge are fundamentally interconnected -- and, by extension, that all other paths can be found to intersect here, as well."

  
  
  
  
• The Seven Liberal Arts : About the Liberal Arts
  
  
  
• The Villa of the Muses and the Liberal Arts
  
  
  
• Why Study Classics?
  
  
  
• The Liberal Arts: Preparation for Life and Leadership
  -- "Socrates was not put to death because of long speeches. He was served that hemlock cocktail because he asked hard questions."
  
  
• The Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences Yesterday and Today by Douglas R. Knauer, MPS

  "In the 18th century, Masonic lodges served as schools for the imparting of knowledge not only on ethics, religion, and human relations, but also on astronomy, music, arithmetic, architecture and so on. This is apparent through the lectures of William Preston, a London printer, who wrote the Middle Chamber lectures which 200 years later are still used in many Grand Lodge Jurisdictions.
  
  The idea of the liberal arts and sciences dates back to Ancient Greece. The Greeks regarded both science and handicrafts as belonging to the realm of art. The arts were classified as ''liberal," "artes liberales" and "vulgar", "artes vulgares". The "liberal arts" were intellectual arts, versus the "vulgar arts" which required physical or mechanical work. Physical work was thought to be demeaning, thus the idea of "vulgar arts". "

  (The words "artes", "liberales", and "vulgar" are of course Latin, not Greek.)
  
  disclaimer

  
  
  

• The Tradition

  "The liberal arts are based on the belief that disciplined learning is the road to freedom in one's personal intellectual life and career. In medieval universities, the seven liberal arts were grammar, logic and rhetoric - known as the trivium - as well as the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. While the modern liberal arts are conceived somewhat differently, they pursue the same tradition of ordered learning to cultivate the mind."

  
  
  
• The Place of the Arts in Classical Education by Gregory Wilbur
  
  
• The Need for Logic Instruction in Public Schools
  
  
• Trivium Pursuit Catalog
  
  
• The Trivium High School
  
  
• CCH links1
  
  
• CCH links2
  
  
• On the Trivium
  
  
• Schola Classical Tutorials offers group tutorials over the internet in the subjects of a classical liberal arts curriculum: classical languages, the great books of literature and history, rhetoric, and logic. These are the subjects that teach students the skills of thinking and learning and that teach them the history of the ideas that have shaped our culture. These skills, and a knowledge of these ideas, are the foundation for further study in college and for a life of reading, conversation, raising a family, and intelligent participation as Christians in our culture.
  
  
  

  ---

  
  
  
• Education gap grows between rich, poor

  In 1970, wealthier students were six times more likely to graduate by age 24 as poor ones. But after more than a decade of government programs aimed at making higher education more affordable, the gap had narrowed significantly. Wealthier students were only four times more likely to receive bachelor's degrees. But then, the trend reversed itself...
  
  Over half of the bachelor's degrees in the U.S. are going to students from the top 25 percent of the family income distribution. That means that less than half of the bachelor's degrees being awarded are going to kids from the bottom three quartiles of family income."

  
  

  ---

  
  
  
• The Gathering Darkness : America In The 21st. Century
  by Scott Bidstrup

  "How, then, do you solve a law and order problem?
  
  It is my opinion that there is only one solution that is compatible with Jeffersonian democratic ideals that has any hope of succeeding. That is a strong committment to a sound educational policy, based on truth and reason , not on political propaganda or religious dogma."

  
  
  
• Inventing Kindergarten
  by Norman Brosterman, with Kiyoshi Togashi, Photographer
  
  Can excellence be taught? Inventing Kindergarten presents a persuasive case that the programs developed by Friedrich Froebel prepare the very young to understand intuitively the harmonies between different aspects of experience.
  
  
• John Allen Paulos, author of Innumeracy and several other books
  
  
• HORACE MANN ON EDUCATION AND NATIONAL WELFARE 1848
  
  
  
  
  
• Jefferson's Children; Education and the Promise of American Culture
  by Leon Botstein
  
  Not the last word on the subject, but worth a look
  
  
  
  
• Illiberal Education; The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus
  by Dinesh D'Souza
  
  
• "Public Schools are Open for Business" from Culture Watch

  " The commercial invasion of our public schools has reached epidemic proportions. Students are being bombarded, says Mark Crispin Miller, professor of culture and communications at New York University, by six highly destructive messages: "Watch," "Don't Think," "Let Us Fix It," "Eat Now," "You're Ugly," and "Just Say Yes."

  
  
  
• "Our Masters' Voices: The Growing Power of Global Media"
  
  
• Project on Media Ownership / PROMO
  
  
• PROMO introductory Fact Sheet
  
  
• another PROMO site (?)
  
  

  looking pretty funky as of 23 AUG 99 -- many blank pages.
  I'm fairly sure it's their problem and not mine.

  
  
  

• Raising Kids
  
  
• ##
  
  
• Cedarwood Sudbury School
  
  
• Project 2061 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science is "a long-term effort to reform science, mathematics, and technology education"
  
  
• If we're so dumb, why are we rich?
  
  
• Nobel Prize Winners Hate School
  
  
• ###
  
  
• The Nine Muses
  
  
• Reviving the Academies of the Muses by David Fideler
  
  
• from the report of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Youth at the Edge
  
  More info here
  
  press release here
  
  Why? A Generation in Trouble
  Commentary by Mark Potok, Intelligence Report editor
  
  ########## Teaching Tolerance / Responding to Hate at School
  
  ########## Intelligence Project / Ten Ways to Fight Hate
  
  
• Liberal Education and the Democratic Ideal and Other Essays By Alfred Whitney Griswold.
  
  
• Liberal Education and the Democratic Ideal by A. Whitney Griswold
  
  
• An Aristocracy of Everyone : The Politics of Education and the Future of America
  by Benjamin R. Barber
  
  
• Hands off Harry Potter! by Chris Gregory
  
  page 2
  
  page 3
  
  
• Educating a Democracy
  by Deborah Meier
  

  "...fifteen years after analysts discovered the great crisis of American education, the American economy is soaring, the productivity of our workforce is probably tops in the world, and our system of advanced education is the envy of the world."

  
  
  
• Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom
  by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath
  
  
  Interview
  
  
  
  
• "Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge"
  by Bruce Sterling
  Speech to the Library Information Technology Association, June 1992, San Francisco CA
  

  "Can you believe that Melville Dewey once said, 'free as air, free as water, free as knowledge?'
  Free as knowledge? Let's get real, this is the modern world --- air and water no longer come cheap!
  Hey, you want breathable air, you better pay your air conditioner's power-bill, pal. Free as water? Man, if you've got sense you buy the bottled variety or pay for an ionic filter on your tap. And free as knowledge? Well, we don't know what ``knowledge'' is, but we can get you plenty of data, and as soon as we figure out how to download it straight into student skulls we can put all the teachers into the breadline and the librarians as well."

  
  
  
• "Students in a class of American Government and politics at the University of Maryland, European Division, circulated a portion of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence among a cross section of Americans at an Air Force base in Germany."
  
  -- versions of this story are often circulated as "urban legends"; here we may have an instance that we can actually pin down.
  
  
  
• "Public Schools are Open for Business" from Culture Watch

  " The commercial invasion of our public schools has reached epidemic proportions. Students are being bombarded, says Mark Crispin Miller, professor of culture and communications at New York University, by six highly destructive messages: "Watch," "Don't Think," "Let Us Fix It," "Eat Now," "You're Ugly," and "Just Say Yes. "

  
  
  
• Q & A from taorestore.org
  Q) Is there any modern Chinese research into the history of Taoism? - Ian Johnson
  
  A) I am not aware of good and serious Chinese research on Taoism. The problem is that:
  
  1) Chinese scholars do not utilize accurate methodology, and their work is therefore not reliable. They begin with a theory and then they look for texts that fit that theory. They frequently cite texts without giving accurate references and without putting them in context, so that they can interpret the texts as they want;
  
  2) Taoism is often considered by good Confucian scholars as "superstition", or minor and heterodox. ...
  
  I wrote some entries for that version (a new Encyclopedia of Taoism currently being prepared) , but it seems that the editors did not like my entries because I said things that 'are not traditional" .
  
  ( Isabelle Robinet )
  
  
  
• A look at the Shaolin educational philosophy in
  Description of the Temples:
  Shaolin Temple Life
  
  
  
• Hegel's Logic of Desire by Peter Kalkavage
  

  " The Phenomenology (Phenomenology of Spirit by George Hegel) belongs to a quartet of greatest works on the theme of education. The other three members of the quartet are Plato's Republic, Dante's Divine Comedy and Rousseau's Emile."

  -- Hmm, ok ...

  
  
  
  

• Mississippi is Deserving of Its Worst Schools Rank
  by Gregory Kane
  
  This article is about at my personal borderline between "justifiable criticism" and "mean-spirited partisanship".
  In the spirit of fairness I've played devil's advocate and inserted some editorial comments.

  "When the Confederate States of Bubbadom (sic, see Confederate States of America) were formed in 1861, educating the populace was clearly not at the top of the agenda. (I don't know whether this is true or not.)
  
  Apparently, not much has changed in the ensuing 140 years. When Confederate flag wavers claim they're proudly celebrating the history of their ancestors by their act, folks ... have to ask: pride in what?
  
  The Confederacy was one of the most backward, repressive and ignorant countries that ever existed. Its most flagrant sin was the perpetuation of chattel slavery, which latter-day Confederate flag-wavers excuse by claiming that most whites in the South didn't own slaves.
  
  They say it with pride, but that's nothing to be proud of. Most whites in the antebellum South were poor, illiterate and uneducated, as were most of the black slaves. (True of most of the population in all countries until recently, and notably of agricultural economies like the antebellum South.) The disparity in wealth was so great that few could own slaves. That made the South not a democracy but an oligarchy. It wasn't a noble experiment in participatory democracy and racial brotherhood, as today's Confederate flag-wavers claim. For the slaves, it was a police state. For free blacks and poor whites, it wasn't much better.
  
  ... neo-Confederates will claim that the Confederacy's war against the Union was a heroic defense of states' rights. The states' rights to do what, exactly? (I believe the Libertarian and/or Neo-Confederate answer would be: "To do whatever they thought was right.")
  
  To keep large numbers of its citizens in illiteracy and ignorance, to name just one of those dubious "rights."
  The Confederate battle flag is thus a fitting symbol for Mississippi, as well as its sister Southern states, judging by their poor-to-mediocre academic performances."

  
  Literacy education of Blacks was discouraged in the Southern states (See for example the autobiography of Federick Douglass.) Several states even had formal laws prohibiting it.
  
  As I understand them, the values of Neo-Confederates are almost diametrically opposed to my own.
  
  I'd schematize these values as:
  
  Appreciation of supernaturalism, of hierarchialism, of authoritarianism and conventionalism, of personal and group separatism, of self-indulgence without concern for others (or with only superficial concern that "formal etiquette" be followed), of the acceptablity of violence, of a focus on the past to the detriment of the present and future.
  
  Suspicion of high levels of education and rationalism, of formal societal structures to assist the disadvantaged.
  
  Let's Ditch Dixie by Mark Strauss
  13 MAR 2001

  "The North and South can no longer claim to be one nation. ...
  
  More people live below the poverty line in the old Confederacy than in the Northeast and Midwest combined. You are three times more likely to be murdered in parts of Dixie than anywhere in New England, despite a feverish devotion to "law-and-order" that has made eight Southern states home to 90 percent of all recent U.S. executions. The South has the highest infant-mortality rate and the highest incidences of sexually transmitted diseases, while it lags behind the rest of the country in terms of test scores and opportunities for women. (How is author Strauss defining and measuring "opportunities for women"?) The Confederate states rail against the tyranny of big government, yet they are the largest recipients of federal tax dollars. They steal business away from the North the same way that developing countries worldwide have always attracted foreign direct investment: through low wages and anti-union laws. The flow of guns into America's Northern cities stems largely from Southern states. The tobacco grown by ol' Dixie kills nearly a half-million Americans each year."

  
  
  
  ###
  
  
  
  
• His Mission Is Sorting Out America's Messy Revolution
  by Tim Rutten
  Los Angeles Times, 22 APR 2001

  "By the mid-19th century, (Library of America publisher Max) Rudin pointed out, a distinctive American language with a recognizable public voice had emerged. It was a national language shaped not only by nearly universal exposure to the cadences of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, but also by its dissemination through increasingly sophisticated mass media -- newspapers, weekly magazines and journals. Through such media, fluent spokesmen of the emerging national language--Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain, for example -- exerted a powerful and widely imitated influence."

  
  
  
  
• Interview with Richard Dawkins
  The Times 24 JUL 2001

  "Where else but modern Britain would “elite” have become a dirty word? It means simply the best. Would you criticise Sampras and Agassi for being élite tennis players?
  
  Admittedly, there is a bad form of élitism, meaning the exclusion, by the present élite, of those wishing to join. My purpose is the opposite. I am so élitist, I want the élite to grow. That means not talking down to the degraded level of Sun readers and Big Brother gossipers, but instead striving, using rhetoric if necessary, to show something better. Science is fascinating by its very nature and its appeal needs no contrived broadening. Let’s hear it for élitism, and let’s all try to join the élite."

  
  
  
  
• On Astrologers by Bertrand Russell

  "In schools and universities information of all sorts is ladled out, but no one is taught to reason, or to consider what is evidence for what."

  
  
  
  
• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

"(Sir Isaac) Newton singlehandedly contributed more to the development of science than any other individual in history. He surpassed all the gains brought about by the great scientific minds of antiquity, producing a scheme of the universe which was more consistent, elegant, and intuitive than any proposed before."

And how many other mothers and fathers succeeded, I wonder ...