Monthly Archive: October 2016

  I return, with some trepidation, to the all-important nexus of Eros, morality, and learning. Plato’s Symposium is, for me, the most indispensable book on the nature and meaning of education. In my dream teacher’s college of the future, this would be the only book taught, and it would be studied for ten years before anyone would be permitted to seek employment as...

  But when she was about to bear Zeus, the father of gods and men, then she besought her own dear parents, Earth and starry Heaven, to devise some plan with her that the birth of her dear child might be concealed, and that retribution might overtake great, crafty Cronus for his own father and also for the children whom he had swallowed...

  Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs 16:18 (King James Version)    It is high time for parents who care about the future of their children, their communities, and their civilization to stop telling themselves comforting lies about their power to combat the degradations of public education. Believing that reason and morality can be restored while leaving...

  Till this moment, I never knew myself. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice   There are many obstacles to overcome if there is to be any hope of saving tomorrow from the grip of today’s progressive pre-education camps. The most stubborn obstacle of all, however, is perhaps the one embedded in our own hearts, namely the all too human inclination to comfort ourselves...

  The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless lads; for they have cast out Hermodorus, the best man among them, saying, “We will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others.”[1] Heraclitus    Imagine trying to fight a war...

  Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murder’d, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, And fall a-cursing, like a very drab, A scullion! Hamlet, Act II Scene ii   On the subject of dismantling compulsory government schooling, many people seem...

  Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object...

  I began this examination of the meaning, sources, and history of public education with the young Benjamin Disraeli’s famous description of state schooling as “tyranny in the nursery.” Should we not be surprised, then, that Disraeli himself, barely a generation later, became a leading player in the development of his own nation’s compulsory school laws, relenting at last before the global push...