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Teacher Magazine: Students 'Click' in Class 9/27/2008

Hanford swears by the "clicker," a device that looks like a remote control but functions as a silent link between Hanford and her students. The clicker lets students answer Hanford's questions simultaneously and allows her to see what proportion of the class understood the concept.

Tags: teaching, schools, ideas on 2008-10-16 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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John Adams

Without wishing to damp the ardor of curiosity or influence the freedom of inquiry, I will hazard a prediction that, after the most industrious and impartial researchers, the longest liver of you all will find no principles, institutions or systems of education more fit in general to be transmitted to your posterity than those you have received from your ancestors.-- John Adams (letter to the young men of the Philadelphia, 7 May 1798)

Tags: ideas, quotes, children, education on 2008-07-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The Simple Dollar » 100 Things to Do During a Money Free Weekend

Tags: ideas, home on 2008-07-22 and saved by13 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Richard M. Weaver -- Ideas Have Consequences

Tags: agrariaism, industrialism, ideas, natural-law, information-overload on 2008-04-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.orthodoxytoday.org

I have been chiefly impressed by
the difficulty of getting certain initial facts admitted. This difficulty is due in part to the
widely prevailing Whig theory of history, with its belief that the most advanced point in time
represents the point of highest development, aided no doubt by theories of evolution which suggest
to the uncritical a kind of necessary passage from simple to complex.
Yet the real trouble is found
to lie deeper than this. It is the appalling problem, when one comes to actual cases, of getting
men to distinguish between better and worse.
There is ground for declaring that
modern man has become a moral idiot. So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept
the rebuke which comes of admitting that our present state may be a fallen state, that one
questions whether people now understand what is meant by the superiority of an ideal.
We have for many years moved with a brash confidence that man had
achieved a position of independence which rendered the ancient restraints needless. Now, in the
first half of the twentieth century, at the height of modern progress, we behold unprecedented
outbreaks of hatred and violence; we have seen whole nations desolated by war and turned into penal
camps by their conquerors; we find half of mankind looking upon the other half as criminal.
Everywhere occur symptoms of mass psychosis.
Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause
of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred
in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that
man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of
transcendentals.
It was William of Occam who propounded
the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence.
The practical result of
nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as
reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change in the affirmation of what is real,
the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism.
The denial of universals carries with it the denial of
everything transcending experience. The denial of everything transcending experience means
inevitably-though ways are found to hedge on this-the denial of truth. With the denial of objective
truth there is no escape from the relativism of "man the measure of all things."
The expulsion of the element of unintelligibility in nature was
followed by the abandonment of the doctrine of original sin. If physical nature is the totality and
if man is of nature, it is impossible to think of him as suffering from constitutional evil; his
defections must now be attributed to his simple ignorance or to some kind of social deprivation.
One comes thus by clear deduction to the corollary of the natural goodness of man.
There followed references to "nature and nature's God," and the
anomaly of a "humanized" religion.
After it has been granted that man is molded entirely by environmental pressures, one is
obligated to extend the same theory of causality to his institutions. The social philosophers of
the nineteenth century found in Darwin powerful support for their thesis that human beings act
always out of economic incentives, and it was they who completed the abolishment of freedom of the
will. The great pageant of history thus became reducible to the economic endeavors of individuals
and classes; and elaborate prognoses were constructed on the theory of economic conflict and
resolution. Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was
at stake, was replaced by man the wealth-seeking and -consuming animal.
There is no term proper to describe the condition in which he is now left unless it be
"abysmality." He is in the deep and dark abysm, and he has nothing with which to raise
himself. His life is practice without theory. As problems crowded upon him, he deepens confusion by
meeting them with ad hoc policies. Secretly he hungers for truth but consoles himself with
the thought that life should be experimental. He sees his institutions crumbling and rationalizes
with talk of emancipation. Wars have to be fought, seemingly with increased frequency; therefore he
revives the old ideals-ideals which his present assumptions actually render meaningless-and, by the
machinery of state, forces them again to do service. He struggles with the paradox that total
immersion in matter unfits him to deal with the problems of matter.
if words no longer
correspond to objective realities, it seems no great wrong to take liberties with words.
The Renaissance
it was still, by heritage, at least, an ideational world and was therefore near
enough transcendental conceptions to perceive the dehumanizing effects of specialization.
a patent increase in man's dominion over
nature which dazzled all but the most thoughtful
popular education. The latter might have proved a good in itself, but it was wrecked on
equalitarian democracy's unsolvable problem of authority: none was in a position to say what the
hungering multitudes were to be fed.
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- The problem of authority in popular education.
  posted by wisely on 2008-04-23
might have proved a good in itself, but it was wrecked on
equalitarian democracy's unsolvable problem of authority: none was in a position to say what the
hungering multitudes were to be fed.
Add Sticky Note
- The problem of authority in education.
  posted by wisely on 2008-04-23
in an
abdication of the authority of knowledge, came the elective system.
This was followed by a carnival
of specialism, professionalism, and vocationalism, often fostered and protected by strange
bureaucratic devices, so that on the honored name of university there traded a weird con genes of
interests, not a few of which were anti-intellectual even in their pretensions. Institutions of
learning did not check but rather contributed to the decline by losing interest in Homo sapiens
to develop Homo faber.
This story of man's passage from religious or philosophical transcendentalism has been told many
times, and, since it has usually been told as a story of progress, it is extremely difficult today
to get people in any number to see contrary implications. Yet to establish the fact of decadence is
the most pressing duty of our time because, until we have demonstrated that cultural decline is a
historical fact-which can be established-and that modern man has about squandered his estate, we
cannot combat those who have fallen prey to hysterical optimism.
Add Sticky Note
- A noteworthy quotation.
  posted by wisely on 2008-04-23
Such is the task, and our most serious obstacle is that people traveling this downward path
develop an insensibility which increases with their degradation. Loss is perceived most clearly at
the beginning; after habit becomes implanted, one beholds the anomalous situation of apathy
mounting as the moral crisis deepens. It is when the first faint warnings come that one has the
best chance to save himself; and this, I suspect, explains why medieval thinkers were extremely
agitated over questions which seem to us today without point or relevance. If one goes on, the
monitory voices fade out, and it is not impossible for him to reach a state in which his entire
moral orientation is lost. Thus in the face of the enormous brutality of our age we seem unable to
make appropriate response to perversions of truth and acts of bestiality. Multiplying instances
show complacency in the presence of contradiction which denies the heritage of Greece, and a
callousness to suffering which denies the spirit of Christianity. Particularly since the great wars
do we observe this insentience. We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the
capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.
when we reflect upon the cataclysms of the age, we are chiefly impressed with the
failure of men to rise to the challenge of them.
Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it
cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil.
For, as the course goes on, the movement turns
centrifugal; we rejoice in our abandon and are never so full of the sense of accomplishment as when
we have struck some bulwark of our culture a deadly blow.
In view of these circumstances, it is no matter for surprise that, when we ask people even to
consider the possibility of decadence, we meet incredulity and resentment. We must consider that we
are in effect asking for a confession of guilt and an acceptance of sterner obligation; we are
making demands in the name of the ideal or the suprapersonal, and we cannot expect a more cordial
welcome than disturbers of complacency have received in any other age.
Added to this is the egotism of modern man, fed by
many springs, which will scarcely permit the humility needed for self-criticism.
The apostles of modernism usually begin their retort with catalogues of modern achievement, not
realizing that here they bear witness to their immersion in particulars.
Whoever desires to praise some modern
achievement should wait until he has related it to the professed aims of our civilization as
rigorously as the Schoolmen related a corollary to their doctrine of the nature of God. All
demonstrations lacking this are pointless.
If it can be agreed, however, that we are to talk about ends before means, we may begin by
asking some perfectly commonplace questions about the condition of modern man. Let us, first of
all, inquire whether he knows more or is, on the whole, wiser than his predecessors.
The whole tendency of modern thought, one might say its whole moral impulse, is to keep the
individual busy with endless induction. Since the time of Bacon the world has been running away
from, rather than toward, first principles, so that, on the verbal level, we see "fact"
substituted for "truth," and on the philosophic level, we witness attack upon abstract
ideas and speculative inquiry.
the average man has become imbued with this notion and imagines that an
industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge. With what pathetic trust
does he recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a
great many small things.
If our contemporary
belongs to a profession, he may be able to describe some tiny bit of the world with minute
fidelity, but still he lacks understanding.
It may be doubted whether one person in three draws what may be correctly termed knowledge from his freely chosen reading matter. The staggering number of facts to which he today has access serves only to draw him away from consideration of first principles, so that his orientation becomes peripheral. And looming above all as a reminder of this fatuity is the tragedy of modern Germany, the one totally literate nation.
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- The perils of infomation-overload? The peril of neglecting God -- neglecting virtue?
  posted by wisely on 2008-04-23
One of the strangest
disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and
the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today.
Standards of
consumption which he cannot meet, and which he does not need to meet, come virtually in the guise
of duties.
it is a constant
law of human nature that the more a man has to indulge in, the less disposed he is to endure the
discipline of toil-that is to say, the less willing he is to produce that which is to be consumed.
A great material establishment, by its very temptation to
luxuriousness, unfits the owner for the labor necessary to maintain it, as has been observed
countless times in the histories of individuals and of nations.
Man is constantly being assured today that he has more
power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness. Look at him
today somewhere in the warren of a great city.
Modern social and corporate organization makes independence an expensive thing; in
fact, it may make common integrity a prohibitive luxury for the ordinary man, as Stuart Chase has
shown
that some cultures have passed from a high state of organization to
dissolution can be demonstrated as objectively as anything in history. One has only to think of
Greece, of Venice, of Germany.
The assertion that changes from generation to generation are
illusory and that there exist only cycles of biological reproduction is another form of that denial
of standards, and ultimately of knowledge, which lies at the source of our degradation.

Rediscovering the Heroic Conservatism of Richard M. Weaver

"The true conservative, Weaver’s conservative, has been pushed to the distant fringes of the party, his voice silenced in the political dialogue lest he make the party seem “extremist.” It is now more important to win legislative seats and to hold office than to advocate positions and to defend principles."

Tags: conservative, conservatism, politics, ideas on 2008-04-22 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Weaver's Southern Christendom - The Acton Institute

Tags: ideas, agrarianism, history, biography on 2008-04-22 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.acton.org

His new doctoral dissertation, titled: The Confederate South, 1865—1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and a Culture, was begun under H. Arlin Turner but completed under Cleanth Brooks.
His dissertation would reveal a particular American culture that essentially was feudal, chivalrous, hierarchical, stable, and harmonious. A culture that educated its “gentlemen” to understand virtue, morals, and a “humanism” that defines “the classic qualities of magnificence, magnanimity, and liberality” and one, in which, its people practiced an “older religiousness” that was conscientious in its rituals and obedient to doctrine.
So we come to the crux of Weaver's argument. The South, rejecting materialism as an end in itself, believed in those things of higher value: in metaphysical absolutism, in an acceptance of universals, in the transcendent, and revealed Truth. Weaver understood the pernicious effects of Original Sin, that man's nature, while created good, is now corrupted, disposed more toward doing evil than doing good, and that this condition could not be relieved until man became subservient to God's Will and abandoned man's will. Then a society could perpetuate a “moral order.” All of these themes were writ large in Southern Christendom, rooted in the reality of the soil, in agrarianism. Her people conducted themselves with an eye toward God, and moral rectitude, with an understanding of the importance of the family, and the special relationship of the land and community. The South sought to re-create a non-materialist, moral, society and Weaver opined that, “Only this can save us from a future of nihilism, urged on by the demoniacal force of technology and by our own moral defeatism.”
Mark G. Malvasi, writes that, “The Southern tradition, in Weaver's analysis, offered a core of resistance to the most powerfully corrupting forces of the modern age: rationalism, positivism, materialism, egalitarianism, individualism, and science.” Malvasi argues that modernity had successfully “abolished both the past and the transcendent as dimensions of meaning.” Man may become materially rich and physically comfortable, Malvasi explains, but there is a dysphoria expressed by “the deep psychic anxiety” and dramatic increases in mental illness. A society does not attain greatness merely by achieving wealth, abundance, and power but rather through the “resilience, magnanimity, and piety of its people.”
Weaver was required to explain in Ideas Have Consequences that America in 1948 was in cultural decline. A decline began four hundred years earlier—in Weaver's opinion—when William of Occam espoused the “fateful doctrine of nominalism.” A doctrine that superseded medieval logical realism and in so doing was “the crucial event of the history of Western culture.” It was the virulent philosophical offspring of nominalism, relativism, empiricism, “the hubris of technology,” that Weaver so assiduously critiques.
Weaver postulated that the primary component, that moving force in the reality of societies, was ideas. Nash explains that this theme provided encouragement to conservatives who may have felt overwhelmed by the stunning rise of American statism, and the corresponding cultural decline brought about by materialism and nihilism.
Nash refers to Weaver as “eerily prescient” when he wrote; “We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.”
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- Remarkable quotation.
  posted by wisely on 2008-04-22