A Book List

 

The first step to rescue our civilization is to fix the education system. And, as Lord of the Flies suggests, the essence of civilization is literature. After or along with the basic skills, reading, writing, and arithmetic, our schools need to teach the classics. This is the furniture of the mind.

And a sure sign of the decline of our civilization is that the canon is not taught any more, often  suppressed.

Here is my own essential reading list for saving civilization. Nothing just for entertainment, nothing that is just excellent writing, nothing extra, nothing unnecessarily verbose. These are the books that convey the great ideas, that form a healthy world view and summarize the civilizational discourse. Listed roughly by appropriate age, young to old.

Fables (Aesop)

Cinderella (Perrault)

Snow White (Grimm)

Sleeping Beauty (Perrault)

Rapunzel (Grimm)

The Princess and the Pea (Andersen)

The Emperor’s New Clothes (Andersen)

The Ugly Duckling (Andersen)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll)

Through the Looking Glass (Carroll)

The Odyssey (Homer; in modern translation)

Genesis

Exodus

The Gospel according to Matthew

The Gospel according to Luke

The Nicene Creed

Anne of Green Gables (for Canadian students); Little House on the Prairie (for the USA)

“In the Country of the Blind” (H.G. Wells)

The Declaration of Independence

Animal Farm (Orwell)

Metamorphosis (Kafka)

Lord of the Flies (Golding)

1984 (Orwell)

Heart of Darkness (Conrad)

MacBeth (Shakespeare)

King Lear (Shakespeare)

The Tempest (Shakespeare)

Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)

Meditations (Descartes)

Plato’s Cave

At least, this is the advice of an old guy who has read a lot. Consider this list if you are homeschooling.

Who Am I?

 

The government shutdown in Canada has forced me to homeschool my kids by distance, as they are trapped in the Philippines by the dysfunction for three years of the citizenship and passport office. At the same time, I am coaching other kids after hours who are attending Canadian high schools and American universities as international students.

Interesting that they apparently had no such troubles getting their student visas. One wonders.

When I see what is on my students’ curricula, however, I begin to think it is just as well my kids are not attending. Maybe I can give them a real education instead.

Even when I went through the Ontario schools, back in the 1960s, I thought it scandalous how they wasted our time on subjects most of us would have no use for in later life—algebra, trigonometry, the sciences—while not teaching us essential skills like logic, parliamentary procedure, bookkeeping, and rhetoric.

Yes, I am saying that teaching STEM in high school is a dumb idea. It is. College is the time for such specialization.

But it has gotten worse since I went through. In literature courses, my students study no literature as such. Instead, they get excerpts, second-rate movies and recent popular novels. Rather than read them and consider them as they stand, the students are directed to issues they supposedly illustrate.

From a parent:

“They finished the discussion ‘What is identity? How is it formed?’ ‘Philosophy: What is your true identity (Perceived by self VS perceived by others)’ ‘Identity beyond one's self. What else has an identity?’ ‘Identity and location - can a city have an identity?."

The text is, literally, just a pretext.

And the discussion seems guided in a particular direction. The students are being told what to think.

For example, only two possibilities are given: either your identity is as perceived by self, or as perceived by others. Either assumes there is no external reality. Either assumes our identity is a construct. None of the world’s great philosophical systems would assert such a thing. This is postmodernism. Instead of being taught the established wisdom of our culture, of all cultures, students are being carefully led away from it. This is an anti-education.

Perhaps more sinister is the next line of questioning. What else has an identity? Can a city have an identity?

One suspects the required answer is yes; and this is the gateway into identity politics, collectivism. Blackness is an identity; indigenousness is an identity; transgenderism is an identity. 

And this is the gateway, in turn, into fascist thought. The individual no longer exists except as part of the collective.

The Homeschooling Advantage

Interesting article on the boom in homeschooling from Breitbart.


Some of the main points:

• Homeschooled students consistently do better on standardized tests:

those who are independently educated generally score between the 65th and 89th percentile on these measures, while those in traditional academic settings average at around the 50th percentile.

• Homeschooled students do better in university.

• Homeschooling comes at only a small fraction the cost of public schooling:

the average expenditure for the education of a homeschooled child, per year, is $500 to $600, compared to an average expenditure of $10,000 per child, per year, for public school students

• There seems to be no “socialization problem”with homeschooled students. Schools do not, after all, socialize in any natural way.

Now, what would we say about any other profession that produced consistently worse results, at a vastly higher cost, than can ordinary laypeople? Isn't it simply urgent to get rid of it as swiftly as possible?

The words "quack" or "mountebank" don't begin to do it justice. More like "conspiracy against the public interest."

Reposted from Instapundit: some schools require a doctor's note for children to use sunscreen.

Here, too much regulation is driving up the cost of both schooling and health care. Fire the bureaucrats, and you save both their salaries, and the cost of all the harm they are doing.