Notices by sim@shitposter.club, page 30
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"We are living in a time when sensitivities are at the surface, often vented with cutting words. Philosophically, you can believe anything, so long as you do not claim it to be true. Morally, you can practice anything, so long as you do not claim that it is a “better” way."
-Ravi Zacharias.
One could say, welcome to multiculturalism.
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"A gentleman at my gym approached me one day and said, “Do you know how we make fun of the employees at McDonald’s because they don’t know how to make change without the register telling them what to do? Well, my daughter just got a job running a cash register. She came home crying from work the first day because she realized she doesn’t know how to make change. She is a straight-A senior at the local high school. How did this happen?” We had never spoken before and he had no idea who I was. He told me his children went to an elite, private school in the Bahamas until they attended their local high school in the United States. This caring, engaged father discovered that getting good grades in school no longer means a child is educated. He voiced regret that he and his wife had trusted the school system—both public and private—and we discussed how too often an A means the student behaved and was pleasant to the teacher."
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"Before the printing press, one was defined as educated if one had memorized large quantities of information. Relying on books has actually robbed us of the opportunity to naturally exercise our minds through recitations. Now videos are deteriorating our reading proficiency and are rapidly reducing our common vocabulary. Texting has reduced us even further to just grunting at one another through consonants. Tweets have made our speech quick yet ugly."
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"Because our educational system has rejected many of the traditional tools of learning, we can no longer participate in the great classical conversations of history. We no longer have the ability to make use of the wisdom of the great thinkers from other eras and other continents. My local elementary school’s billboard recently proclaimed the slogan, “We are teaching children for the future, not for the past.” Either it was stating something ridiculously obvious or it was announcing the principal’s intention to dismiss the past as irrelevant to the future. It was a characteristically contemporary thought, especially given that the past is really the only thing we can study. It is impossible to study the future, and the present becomes the past pretty quickly."
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"In order to teach your children classically, you may have to teach them to respect you in a different way, and you may have to become worthy of their respect. Adding the role of teacher to your parental repertoire can be done, however, and may lead to wonderful developments in your family. Contrary to popular culture, it is natural for children to recognize that parents are wiser than themselves and for young adults to want to be personally responsible. Let’s resolve to be adults whom children like to spend time with, not because we are “fun,” but because our kids know that we think it is a great privilege and pleasure to be with them. Let’s show them that when we learn something new, we can’t wait to share our discovery with them. Where there is a vision, parents will find a way."
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"There are many practical purposes for schooling: vocational skills, hobbies, earning a living, social interaction, or just enlarging perspectives. The purpose of a classical education is to equip students to discover the way our universe works. Understanding the physical universe requires a foundational knowledge of math and science. Understanding human nature requires a foundational knowledge of language, history, economics, and literature. To learn foundational information from any field of knowledge, students need to be trained in reading, writing, communication, and analysis of qualitative information. At their highest level, the humanities are studied because they embody the ideas that make us human."
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"The purpose of a classical education is to strengthen one’s mind, body, and character in order to develop the ability to learn anything. This requires consistent discipleship or mentoring by a concerned adult over a long period of time with very specific academic goals. For eventually, the child wants to know why she must learn so much terminology and what to do with what she has learned. These natural questions lead children into dialectic and rhetorical studies."
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"Helping small children who live in the worst circumstances is one reason most of us justify professionalized education. Yet the structure we have built to protect and nurture these children actually does the opposite. Imagine an impoverished six-year-old boy who rarely gets a healthy meal and rarely has parental supervision. He finally goes to school and falls in love with the first person who has ever been there every day for him—his first-grade teacher. She loves and encourages and teaches him. She won’t let the kids bully one another, and she makes sure he gets a good breakfast, lunch, and an after-school snack. Only the weekends are scary. The six-year-old has a daily routine that includes a committed relationship for the very first time. Life is good; hope is learned. Then the school year ends, and this wonderful teacher says, “Good-bye. You will have a great teacher in second grade.”
So the seven-year-old survives the short summer and begins the process all over. But now he has a homeroom teacher, a math and science teacher, a language arts teacher, and a music teacher. Which one is he to fall in love with? Who will fall in love with him? Each of these teachers has dozens of students to care for an hour at a time. And so, at the end of second grade it’s a little less painful to part with his teachers because he never really got to know them. "
Good points.
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"Now we are a nation of parents who believe that if our children don’t enjoy school, something must be wrong with the books or the teacher, but not with the children. Or we seek special labels to justify our children’s weaknesses so they can be given individual instruction that then tries to replicate the very family life we have removed them from. Psychologists and counselors are employed to provide a firm, nurturing, parental hand for struggling children because their parents have been told they are unqualified to fulfill this role."
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"People write as they think and speak. The popular writers of even the recent past like Thoreau, Alcott, and Douglas, are difficult to read by those of us taught to think in tweets."
Lol.
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"We parents also have to deal with the entertainment society engulfing us. Parents even say they would die for one of their children, yet somehow they find it difficult to live with them. I initially found it hard to be a parent, especially when I knew I could be paid to do things I liked equally well. When I became a mother, no one told me it would take about three years to figure things out. I had always worked or been in school. I had to only be responsible for myself. Now there were babies who couldn’t talk demanding my attention. I had to learn how to enjoy being a parent. Now I love it. We read, work on math problems, do chores, and play together. We also fight and sometimes make each other cry. There are times when I’d like to send my children away to boarding school and other times when I wish I had more children. I like the way that I have a different bond with each son."
"For me, the things that seem natural are the things that seem familiar. The root of the words “familiar” and “family” are the same, the Latin familia, “household.” It is natural to want to be with your family. They are the ones who will encourage hard work, rejoicing over successes and empathizing with difficulties."
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"Though critical thinking skills and experiential learning are very valuable, the education associations forgot two things: first, that students needed to memorize information so they would have something in their brain to critically think about or to compare to their experiences, and, second, that the brain needs to be intentionally trained in order to think well. Thinking critically is not inherent in humans. It needs to be practiced repeatedly by comparing memorized ideas with new ideas in a logical manner. Internalizing a critical mass of words and ideas is the first step to thinking well."
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"Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, explains how the age of show business has nullified book banning because no one bothers to even read. He believed that our love for the “technologies that undo our capacity to think” would make us into a culture that would lose its appetite for books and subsequently its ability to process difficult ideas or large quantities of information. In 1985, he predicted our severe reduction in literary skills, since he foresaw popular entertainment replacing attendance at lectures and symposiums."
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"Many parents may dismiss my message because their kids are getting As, enjoy going to school, and are learning basic skills like multiplication. In general, parents acknowledge that modern education is in crisis, but few believe that their children attend a school with real problems. My response is that our standards of even basic literacy are too low. I had one parent email me that I was lying when I said schools no longer taught the multiplication tables. I responded that I’m sure some are teaching the multiplication tables, but I doubted any were teaching them through 20 × 20 or making the students memorize fractional tables. It’s not that teachers aren’t trying; it’s that the standards aren’t rigorous."
I can agree with this. I think as far as we went in school would be the 12 times tables. I can't imagine going to 20 x 20!
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"Textbooks can be great reference tools when a student is researching an unfamiliar topic, but most students never fully engage with a topic if they use only textbooks. All the interesting questions have already been asked and answered for the student by someone else. These days it is rare for a student to identify a textbook that was formative in developing great habits of research, reading, and recitation. Textbooks are structured differently than they were before the 1950s. A well-organized textbook can show students how to determine their own outline for a systematic study of a subject, but contemporary textbooks are not used in that way. Today texts are like nannies, holding your hand each step of the way—as though the authors think they have to tell the student and teacher what to do on Mondays at 9:37 A.M.—rather than as a point to begin more intensive studies. The proliferation of textbooks in schools is testimony to the misguided belief that children are unwilling to struggle with ideas and want all their work done for them and placed in a single source."
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"If I am not able to read, write, and reflect on issues that define citizenship, how can I teach my children to do so? By not teaching our children the art of learning, we are raising a culture that is unable to engage in reasonable discourse. As the world gets smaller and smaller, we will need to preserve our most noble American qualities as they mingle with ideas and customs from other parts of the world. This requires a citizenry that can step back from the daily strain of living and examine life in a larger perspective. We can assess and act upon lessons learned from the downfall of Rome or the persecution of the Sudanese or the building of the Berlin Wall without having personally lived through them. It also requires a citizenry that can intellectually engage the parliaments of the world, as did antislavery advocate William Wilberforce or Benjamin Franklin, and sacrifice personal power, as did Washington or Gandhi."
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"Before I embraced the classical model, I felt I was living in the wrong century and with the wrong tribe. Classical studies introduced me to all of my lost relatives. I now feel that my sense of the world has grown by two thousand years. The voices from the past expand how I see and understand the world around me. I feel as though we hear a deeper, more confident voice and can respond in kind."
Maybe I can find it here too. I'm clearly in the wrong century and with the wrong tribe. A tribe that doesn't care for its own properly, because it would rather be 'caring' for other tribes.
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"Our search led us to the classical model of education that was practiced by scholars as long as there has been learning. The application and success of the model is not confined to a single time or place, though its name refers to the Greek and Roman eras. We discovered that wherever and whenever man had achieved high levels of literacy, the classical skills of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric had been emphasized over job training or vocational studies. So we chose to travel down a new path, actually an ancient road, with our four boys. After much work, we discovered that we could participate in the conversations of mankind’s greatest thinkers. Their words allowed us to more confidently confront the problems of daily living."
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"The most important point I can make is that any parent who really tries can become more involved in his or her children’s education. There are many families who like working and learning together. It is not always easy, but it is rewarding to guide your children’s education. The first requirement is to believe that it is important and that you can do it. Whenever I hear a parent groan, “I could never homeschool my children” or “The classical model is too hard,” I find I have to agree with them—not for everyone, but for those who lack confidence. The person who says, “I can” and the person who says, “I can’t” are both right. I believe every parent can participate in the restoration of our culture to one that appreciates classical learning, but only if they will believe it about themselves. I believe the strong love of parents for their children makes them capable of providing a quality education for children centered from the home."
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"Parents and teachers ask me about classical education nearly every day. They know something is just not quite right with contemporary education, and they know it’s not right because their child isn’t learning as much or as well as he or she could. You know that education should connect your family to the best of history while preparing them for the future. The classical model provides insights not only into what your family could be learning, but also how to learn it. Then your family can also listen to the wisdom of the past, and their voices can help us evaluate our daily lives and see our place and purpose in a broader historical perspective."
sim
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