To be fair, I’m sure many of them were there just to learn about this strange alien ideology the teabaggers are always railing against, not because they are sympathetic to the ideas of positive rights, political correctness, a heavily progressive income tax, public sector unionization, government redistribution of wealth, an egalitarian-based civil society, or the Balkanization of the population into manageable (and often competing) identity groups — leaving the technocratic and bureaucratic elite in control of molded and running an ordered, centralized society built on the idea of conformity among the masses. For the fairness.
So. Nothing to see here. And it’s just like you wingnuts to try and glean from such participation some kind of tacit consent for the underlying ideology being intellectually considered.
Just because they ball and raise their fists doesn’t mean they’re down with the struggle. In fact, how dare you question their patriotism! McCarthyites!
Why heavens forfend, question their patriotism?! So much are these good folk patriots, they want to own the whole-shebang, lock, gunstock and barrel. [h/t Powerline]
I think it is mostly because they really are useful idiots who wouldn’t understand a fucking thing you wrote but just want to do what they are told.
That’s what passes for an education these days, you know, learning to do what you are told.
did mikey moore bring the donuts ?
Something about “birds of a feather” seems to go here, but I misremember the exact wording…
well if this + mass school shootings aren’t enough to make you homeschool, I don’t know what would.
single parents are screwed though, we can’t homeschool :(
If Man Mountain Pendejo brought donuts, he’d have to feed them to the other attendees like they were baby birds. Which, they must be used to that.
“That’s what passes for an education these days, you know, learning to do what you are told.”
That’s more or less what’s been passing for an education (at least for non-elite people) since the introduction of the Prussian education system in the 19th century. “What you’re told” has changed a lot, but not the indoctrinary nature of the process.
We’re starting to see some real alternatives. Is it soon enough? I don’t know.
Missfixit, put your kids in parochial school. It isn’t very expensive if you belong to the parish and, you get a discount for each additional kid in the family enrolled.
The kids wear uniforms, too so your school clothes expense is less. They will bus the kids if you live too far for them to walk or you can’t drive them. You don’t have to be a Catholic either or join the parish, but you may have to wait longer for an available place for them in the school.
Most of the teachers are laymen now since all the nuns are pretty old. The kids learn a lot, there is a lot of discipline. They go to church once a week and more during different holiday seasons, so they are learning a faith and the schools are big on morals and personal responsibility. Bonus: trouble-makers get the heave-ho and don’t stick around bullying your kid for years and years.
“single parents are screwed though, we can’t homeschool :(”
Maybe find some like-minded parents and divvy up the job?
i don’t think there is a parochial school within driving distance of where we live, I’ve been looking into charters etc. but again, are any of these schools well protected? sigh. panic attack over this all week
the good news is that homeschooling has been getting much more popular, to the point of being mainstream. Come a long way since I was in school. the options are good if you’ve got one person who can stay home.
“Maybe find some like-minded parents and divvy up the job?”
this totally depends on which state you live in. SC has laws about what percentage of the schooling must come from the parents (50%)
I think parochial schools are going to be made illegal… or else maybe the Marxists will claim they are only Jesuit Marxists, not atheistic, murdering Marxists.
I don’t know much about charter schools. I thought they were just sort of an honors version of regular public school.
Are there parochial schools were you plan to move?
I have a number of friends who have home-schooled (with mixed success), in fact our own Carin homeschooled her kiddos for quite a while and so does Dale Price, wherever he’s been. It’s not for me, but you have to do what you have to do.
Eva Brann, again [from her Paradoxes of Education in a Republic, c. 2 “Tradition”] :
All the Founders (among whom Paine, the exception, need not be numbered) had a classical training, some, especially Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, a very thorough one. They had the taste and the tools to appropriate the classical tradition. They were founders of a polity without “a model on the face of the globe” (Madison, Federalist 14) who had the advantage of perfect self-awareness because they knew that which allowed them to distinguish the new from the old. Just one example: They knew in detail and from original sources what it was that made the antique participatory democracies unsuitable models for modern republics. (Madison, Federalist 10 and 14.) But they were in the condition of all successful liberating generations — they made that obsolete which made them what they were.[37] The problem is that, as the process of obsolescence progressed, their own Founding would be obscured. For when the ancients become inaccessible, the moderns become unintelligible.
a lot of Europe bans both weapons & homeschooling. coincidence?
“I think parochial schools are going to be made illegal”
Alternatively, they’ll just be required to teach something that’s so incompatible with church doctrine that they’ll have to close. That’s already in progress with Catholic hospitals and churches themselves.
It’s happened before:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_school
“SC has laws about what percentage of the schooling must come from the parents (50%)”
How is this measured?
Half of Europe was also behind the Iron Curtain for 50+ years. They changed their tune, so there is always hope for the future.
Sdferr, one of my sons was learning The Iliad and The Odyssey when he was in the third grade. It made for very interesting dinner table talk with an 8 year old.
It’s happened before
It never works. It just goes underground and then comes back with a vengence.
You’d think these fascists would learn.
The parochial schools could be forced to let the teachers organize and then the unions could file anti discrimination suits against Catholic schools that hire Catholics
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1973/1973-h/1973-h.htm
Here’s a version aimed at kids that was written before PC had its way (the first hint is that it calls Odysseus “sacker of cities” right in the title…heh).
I can’t speak to its accuracy, but Lang is usually pretty good. Maybe sdferr will give us his take.
Sorry
That should have been fair labor practices lawsuits; with special emphasis on the word fair.
See, Marx, Stalin, Mao and the rest were really a hamfisted bunch… American Marxism is way more indirect once you get it off the Chicago streets and into the halls of academia. The great purges of the intellectuals won’t happen here, because it was already almost done… everyone who can look at Marxism and say: “that’ll never work and here is why” is being marginalized. Their work is now called hate speech.
I always read to and with my kids when they were small. We were reading chapter books when they were in preschool. Also, since I’m mean and stuff, I made them read classics over summer break and would quiz them every night to make sure they weren’t just pretending to read them.
They read a lot of the books that are recommended in The Educated Child. And, we read poetry aloud so they don’t do that annoying sing-song thing that a lot of people do when they read poetry.
Thankfully it wasn’t Odysseus “ravager of goats”. At 8 though, the best might have been made of the plasticity of a young brain to take in new language through raw exposure (whether this one, Homeric Greek, or another), rather than to trifle with tales of tales, or tales of the affairs of men at war and sea. But hey, if the boat floats, it’s ripe pickin’s for Poseidons’ trident?
He was busy with Homer and dinosaurs back then. I’m not sure when he went off the dinosaur kick, but he used to tell anyone who would listen about how he was going to be a paleontologist and work at the Smithsonian. He had even won a prize for a drawing he made of an Apatosaurus that we submitted to The Franklin Institute when he was five. He made a leap from the dinos to Egyptology as well as Ancient Greek battles for quite a while.
I love little boys when they get wound up about learning things. My youngest two love maps and battle strategy. They aren’t little any longer, but they are all about the strategy.
I sort of like this early bit, in passing: “So the child was called Odysseus by his own people, but the name was changed into Ulysses, and we shall call him Ulysses.”
Student: “Hold on there a sec. teach . . . who changed it? Why? And why should we go with that lot? Don’t Odysseus’ have a say? Just where do you imperialistic fucks get off changing other people’s names for them, anyhow? ” . . . etc.
Sdferr, I kept seeing “Eva Brann” as Eva Braun. It took looking up the opus you’ve been quoting on Google to see the nature of my error.
I knew I must be reading something wrong, I just couldn’t identify what.
Heh. Sort of the “Why do all the gods have one name in Greek and the Romans changed them? What’s up with that?”
I keep doing that too, McGehee.
A holiday message from one of my guilty pleasures, the vigilant citizen:
Ach Ja, nicht braun, aber passend, verbrannt zu werden.
Lee, I was reading the NY Times editorial page today (yeah, I know) and that passage you quoted above is exactly the way I felt while I was reading it and the comments. T he comments are worse than the articles. Talk about an echo chamber.
I’m glad I don’t read the NYT very often.
– Bunbblefuck has done his Marxo-socialist schtick, and with something like half the country at or below the poverty line, on welfare, unemplyment or under employed, he’s off to Hawaii for a 5 to 8 million dollar tax-payer funded vacation, and not a single moonbat will so much as raise an eyebrow.
– His christmas gift to America….Let the tax ratws rise to hurt those bastard rich people.
– That no one on the Left see’s any irony in that is all an observer coming from outside would have to see to declare our Republic dead.
It’s annoying how many of a child’s prime learning years are wasted with claptrap, to be sure.
O/T: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/22/too-funny-i-send-mike-mann-a-free-wuwt-calendar-as-a-christmas-gift-and-he-goes-full-conspiracy-theory/
For a Certified Computer Genius, Michael Mann sure doesn’t seem to know much about modern technology. Via Instapundit.
you realize after x number glasses of scotch this satellite tv thing is an utterly transparent ripoff yes
I love Christmas though
I just… god help me
south dakota in winter?
it’s not a subject what can be usefully explored by ms taylor swift
It’s just not
This was a good travel idea when/why?
the railroad brochure said so.
Thus spake mister ripoff opaque.
Redundant headline is redundant. “Marxist conference” makes it seem like this is a one off conference. Language matters, dude. Get the with program :).
We had a booking agent that thought a six week tour of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and North and South Dakota in Jan and Feb was a good idea.
We didn’t have them for long.
Really happy, you have done this trip backwards. You should have started up north and worked your way around to the South. It’d be warmer and there would be more free booze and food.
cover photo from the brochure.