Readings « TeacherLore

Why deconstruction is a fool's game

That way of knowing, he knows, can slip into the sophisticated form of ignorance common among lawyers. We can glimpse it in the story told about a lawyer riding through the country with a friend. They pass a herd of Holsteins. “Look at the spotted cows,” the friend comments. The lawyer looks. “Yes, ” he says. “They appear to be. On this side, at least.” . . . → Read More: Why deconstruction is a fool’s game

Why things fall apart

If it is true that paper and pencil tests along with common educational research methods leave out much that should concern us because many important things are difficult to measure simply and efficiently and with high levels of validity and reliability, and if it is further true that our choices of what is in the curriculum is driven by what we test and measure, then it follows logically that the schools we are building will ignore much that should concern us. . . . → Read More: Why things fall apart

Why literature matters

What interests me most is what Arbery says about The Illiad: “Of all the poems in the history of the West, actual Scripture aside, but including the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and all the devotional lyrics ever written, God loves the Iliad most.” . . . → Read More: Why literature matters

Truth and its envious imitators

I think an important question for teachers today is why intellectuals from the mid-twentieth century on have labored so hard to mystify and problematize truth. It’s a real question and I think there are true answers that are worth understanding. The answers are not immediately obvious though to those who have been subjected to years of ideological indoctrination. . . . → Read More: Truth and its envious imitators

On "reading" the great books

In a Marxist reading of Hamlet, the good prince’s spiritual awakening is invisible, and in a Freudian reading, the urgency of his advice to the queen is lost in psychosexual musings. . . . → Read More: On “reading” the great books

Could we restore a liberal education?

As we neglect the importance of the soul, our language becomes “more abstract and technical, using words like input when what is really meant is opinion. Language becomes less attuned to the personal longings of the being who loves, dies, and is open to truth about all things.” Without steady replenishment from the ancient writers, who were “all about the soul,” we become a people among whom “poetry, and philosophy will lose ground.” . . . → Read More: Could we restore a liberal education?

A new counterculture: beyond the dead zone

It’s been disheartening to watch the humanities, which one could easily imagine would have been home to those least easily fooled by the deadening dissolutions of all the twentieth century’s ideologies, to witness it becoming so badly confused and self-contradictory, following a dead end road of modernity and post-modernity, a way marred with thousands of road signs bearing only slogans and pointing nowhere real. . . . → Read More: A new counterculture: beyond the dead zone

The Moral Confusion of Young People

We need to regain the standards of truth that are embodied in the great works of our own tradition. “Our task,” Signorelli says, “is simply the revival of humanist scholarship, in the schools especially, but in the broader culture also. We must become regular readers again of Sophocles, Thucydides, Petrarch, Cervantes, Racine, Johnson, and Tolstoy, because a mind that is acquainted with their works will find it absolutely ridiculous to suppose that such authors do not state truth.” . . . → Read More: The moral confusion of young people

Comparing V for Vendetta to 1984

McTeigue’s choice of state-run Christian fascism as the source of villainy seems itself more like propaganda than serious art. In brief, the main danger to freedom in Europe now is the same as it was when Orwell wrote: the drive of socialism to progressively increase the depth and breadth of its control. By making the danger out to be Christianity, McTeigue goes along with what the socialists have always said. . . . → Read More: Comparing V for Vendetta to 1984

Robert E. Lee on honesty

If you have any fault to find with any one, tell him, not others, of what you complain; there is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man’s face and another behind his back. We should live, act, and say nothing to the injury of any one. It is not only best as a matter of principle, but it is the path to peace and honor. . . . → Read More: Robert E. Lee on honesty: a companion text to Machiavelli

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