Family photo

Us with (big) little sister.

Fishing in the Mountains

Bracy showing us how to fish while wading in a mountain stream.

On The Road Again

Benjamin with family on the road to the rain forest.
Our little pickup truck overheated and we had to stop and water it. That gave us time for a snack and a stretch (you would be amazed at how many people can fit in the back of a Toyota).

Christ Dying on the Cross

U-Turn

"Progress," said C. S. Lewis, "means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man."

The We We Go

"Civilizations die by suicide not murder."

- Historian Arnold Tonybee

Counter-Culture Education

The following article by Peter J. Leithart gives a good summary of the failure of public education in America and the whole counter-cultural thing that is the Classical School movement. I include a few selections here. This should be required-reading for anyone with children or involved in education. Click on the link below for the entire article.

The New Classical Schooling

The New Dark Ages
"In September 1974, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott delivered the Abbott Memorial Lecture at Colorado College. Entitled “A Place for Learning,” Oakeshott’s lecture attacked the dominant model of education, a model predicated on the theories of the American educationist John Dewey. Learning, Oakeshott observed, should take place under “conditions of direction and restraint designed to provoke habits of attention, concentration, exactness, courage, patience, and discrimination”; but schools shaped by Dewey had instead become arenas of “childish self-indulgence,” “experimental activity,” “discovery,” and “group discussions.”
Oakeshott was especially scornful of the notion that education’s purpose was “socialization,” which could only turn the child into a compliant little cog in the machine of commerce and industry. “The design to substitute ‘socialization’ for education,” he argued, was “the momentous occurrence of this century, the greatest of the adversaries to have overtaken our culture, the beginning of a dark age devoted to barbaric affluence.”¹

In other lectures and writings, Oakeshott elaborated a positive vision of education. Education should initiate the student into a “historic inheritance or ‘culture,’” which Oakeshott imagined as a multi-voiced conversation. Scientific, historical, philosophical, and poetic voices contribute, each voice expressing “a distinct . . . understanding of the world and a distinct idiom of human self-understanding.” Education enables the student to participate in the “endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure” of that conversation. Liberal education is “above all else, an education in imagination, an initiation into the art of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the different modes of utterance, to acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to this conversational relationship, and thus to make our debut dans la vie humaine.”² Since education is the “distinguishing mark of a human being,” replacing education with “socialization” is fundamentally dehumanizing. True education is an initiation into our full humanity. It is not so much a leading-out as a passing-on of the skills necessary to participate in culture."
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Dorthy Sayers
"Once, Sayers argued, things were different. Whereas today we indulge an “artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence,” young men in Tudor England set off to university in their early teens. A medieval student who went through the Trivium acquired the tools for learning, especially the tools of language.¹⁴ Once our culture had these tools as a common possession, but no more:

. . . today a great number—perhaps the majority—of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and newspapers, carry out our research, present our plans and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits—yes, and who educate our young people—have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the Scholastic discipline. Less and less do the children who come to be educated bring any of that tradition with them. We have lost the tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks.^15"

^******

Cheated

"Though classical educators are careful to say they are not reactionary, there is no doubt that the movement is a reaction to the educational failures of the last century. Teachers and parents involved in classical education were schooled during the experimental decades of the mid-twentieth century, and they came away from that experience feeling cheated. Books and articles on classical education regularly begin where Sayers began, with a lament over the sorry state of education. To the educational lapses Sayers recorded in 1947, they add a litany of complaints familiar to any reader of the Intercollegiate Review: postmodernism, relativism, and multiculturalism, not to mention crime, drugs, and condoms in the schools. Kern describes the philosophical foundations of classical education with a brash litany of deliberately anti-PC formulae: “logocentrism, foundationalism, and a teleology that sees the perfection of a thing’s nature as its purpose.”

^{The NEA and Secular Bureaucratization}

"Most obviously, CCE, like other movements in Christian education, protests the secularization of public education that began in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Early in its history, the National Education Association (then known as the National Teacher’s Association) supported the use of public schools to inculcate religious, and hence moral, prescriptions. During the 1870s and 1880s, however, a number of outspoken leaders in the NEA challenged this religious consensus and pressed for a deliberate secularization of the schools.³⁴ Secularization of schools was bound up with several other shifts in American education, as well as with large changes in American society and culture.
For the Progressives of the early twentieth century, the goal of educational reform was to substitute a scientific, professional, standardized, bureaucratized system for the religiously and morally oriented education of the past. Progressives worked through superintendents in larger American cities to organize an educational system for a new scientific age.³⁵
In protesting the secularization of the schools and insisting on the moral dimension of education, classical educators take aim at a range of contemporary values: professionalization, bureaucratization, standardization, deference to “expert” authority, the whole Weberian apparatus of rationalization. Despite the evident conservatism of the movement, CCE is not about maintaining the cultural status quo."

Read the whole thing here: The New Classical Schooling