Professor Glenn on the Tyranny of Public Education

Professor Charles L Glenn of Boston University has contributed a thought-provoking piece over at First Things concerning Secular Education in the United States. It is well worth reading and pondering. Below are a few excerpts.

Most Americans are products of the public school’s 140-year near-monopoly on education, and have an understandable residual loyalty to our current educational settlement; many believe, as advocates of the “myth of the common school” have been arguing since Horace Mann, that only the public school can form citizens. But low test scores and concern over the moral vacuousness of both curriculum and school life dominated by peer culture have shaken faith in the public system. Parents are seeking alternatives, not only in private schools but in charter schools (legally “public” but functionally private), homeschooling, and cyberschools. Even those parents who do not want religion taught in the schools their children attend usually see no problem with other children attending schools whose religious character is preferred by their parents.

America did not always have a rigid educational establishment that claimed religious neutrality. Its rise was propelled by anti-Catholic sentiment, leading to a unified educational system that displaced the patchwork of local arrangements that prevailed in the early republic and that provided a degree of religious pluralism surprising to those raised with the contemporary idea of the separation of church and state. It was common in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for public funding to be provided to schools that we would now consider “private” and religious, the great majority of them Protestant but some of them Catholic. These denominational arrangements were actually the norm in federally funded schooling for children on Indian reservations until the late nineteenth century.

Our nation needs to confront the loss of faith in public education, a loss fueled both by disappointing international comparisons of test results and by a severing of the rootedness of schools in local communities. Consolidation of school districts, professionalization of educational administration, the unresponsiveness of teachers’ unions to the concerns of parents, and ballooning state and federal requirements, all have led to a loss of confidence in America’s schools.

Read the whole article here.

A Long Lost Classic!

I've mentioned this old commercial to people for years, and just when I had despaired finally found it. It still strikes me as one of the most original and humorous ads I've ever seen.

Trotting With Turkeys

Well, I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. This is pure cinema and natural humor. It's worth a few minutes for the timely chuckle.



Trotting With Turkeys:
Says the webiste: One of our CBS13 photojournalists tracks down some wild turkeys on Thanksgiving and gives chase. Nov. 24, 2011

For those in the States, those from the States, and US citizens everywhere:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Life of St Nektarios

Around the Country in Five Minutes

When Brian DeFrees decided to make a trip around the US, he also decided to document his travels with time-lapse photographs. The results are interesting, inspiring, and 'moving'.

Enjoy.

9-11-2011

Réquiem ætérnam dona eis Dómine.
Eternal rest grant them, Lord.

et lux perpétua lúceat eis.
Let light perpetual shine upon them.

Requiéscant in pace. Amen.
May they rest in peace. Amen.

Αἰωνία ἡ μνήμη

Вечная память

The Flint Solution

First, my apologies for the lateness in ending the 'quest'. Time has a way of getting away as they say.

Now, on to the answer to the Quest of the World's Greatest Flint:

At the end of Return of the King, Aragorn, Gandalf and company proceed on horseback to the Moranon - the Black Gate - in a feint to draw out Sauron's forces in the hope of making it easier for Frodo and Samwise to make it to Mount Doom.

Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Merry and Pipen ride out to parlay with the Mouth of Sauron, end negotiations, and as the gate opens ride back to the main body of troops. The camera then shows the "Men of West" charging forward to battle the hosts of Mordor. Only, now they are on foot. All the horses have magically disappeared.

Call me lightning, but I didn't notice this until last month. I told my daughter about the flint, and she later noted that the International Movie Data Base includes it in its list of 'mistakes'.

C'est la vie!