EDUCATION: WHAT IS POSSIBLE

I mentioned yesterday the excellent article by Jonathan Rose which showed how inspiring to ordinary working class people the "dead white males" (so hated by the Left) can be. Rose showed how working class people would once seek them out and read them simply for pleasure and personal enlightenment. We also know how thoroughly the Left have succeeded in removing such authors from present-day high school and college curricula and how the politically correct replacement texts are simply boring to the students. Rose suggests, and I agree, that a restoration of "the greats" to modern curricula would do much to improve educational standards, if only because of the greater enthusiasm they would generate among the students.

In that connection, let me list just some of the authors who were included in my own 6TH GRADE reading book of 50 years ago: Longfellow, Masefield, Dickens, Cervantes, Henry Lawson (a revered Australian poet), Wordsworth, Goldsmith, Whittier, Cowper, Reade, Tolstoy, Scott, Byron and Turgenev. Sadly, that list will probably be meaningless to most of my younger readers unless they are real "culture vultures" but the authors included are some of the greatest prose and poetry authors of all time. If an introduction to "The Greats" on that scale can be accomplished in just one year of primary school, it is perfectly evident that across an entire primary and secondary school curriculum we could offer a fairly complete coverage of the great minds of the past. It is not "too difficult".

Given the proven capacity to inspire of the great authors, a return to them would not only be worthwhile in it own right but should also enthuse the students far more than the boring propaganda they have now and thus lead them on to generally higher levels of educational and intellectual attainment. As some students graduate from modern-day American High Schools barely able to read and write, the scope for improvement in levels of educational and intellectual attainment would seem almost limitless.

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ELSEWHERE

Wow! If there ever was any doubt that Americans are the kindest and most generous people the world has ever seen, read about Herbert Hoover. Just about totally forgotten but he seems to have been the biggest saviour of European lives ever -- and by far. He ought to be the No. 1 hero of the 20th century. It's really infuriating the way important basics about history are not taught these days. The Leftist a**holes who staff the teaching profession only want to tell you whatever bad things they can dredge up about America.

Another Wow! Who said this? Ronald Reagan? "The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone." It could have been said yesterday but it was in fact said by Thomas Jefferson. Looks like American judges have always been people who think they know better than the law they are paid to administer.

A third Wow! Taranto really skewers the NYT today. The NYT says that America has a higher infant mortality rate than Cuba and draws the usual anti-American inferences from that. Taranto notes what underlies the statistics: America makes huge efforts to save premature bablies but, inevitably, many of them die anyway. So they are infant deaths. No comparable effort is made in Cuba so the same baby there would be counted as stillborn and thus not be counted in the infant mortality statistics. So the higher infant mortality in the USA is a sign of a much BETTER medical system. Surprise, surprise!

I normally agree with Jeff Jacoby but he is off with the fairies today. He says America hasn't got enough politicians because Congress is small relative to America's population size. Hasn't he heard of all those State government politicians? Count them in and America has got HEAPS of politicians per head. It must have been a slow week for Jeff this time.

A good quote from Diplomad: "Sitting VERY late for two consecutive nights in interminable meetings with UN reps, hearing them go on about "taking the lead coordination role," pledges, and the impending arrival of this or that UN big shot or assessment/coordination team, for the millionth time I realized that if not for Australia and America almost nobody in the tsunami-affected areas would have survived more than a few days. If we had waited for the UNocrats to get their act coordinated, the already massive death toll would have become astronomical. But, fortunately, thanks to "retrograde racist war-mongers " such as John Howard and George W. Bush, as we sat in air conditioned meeting rooms with these UNocrats, young Australians and Americans were at that moment "coordinating" without the UN and saving the lives of tens-of-thousands of people". (Via Indepundit)

It was "unilateralism" that saved lives in Asia: "The world is in a 'race against time' to prevent a sharp rise in the number of deaths resulting from the devastating Dec. 26 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said at a Jan. 6 summit of world leaders in Jakarta, Indonesia. Yes, Jan. 6 -- 11 days after the tsunami first hit and after an estimated 150,000 people had died... It also was more than a week after the U.S. and other countries had people on the ground helping the victims."

There is an encouraging article here showing that family values are reasserting themselves among younger Americans -- despite all the attacks from feminists and the Left generally.

There is a thorough debunking here of the pre-election Leftist claim that GWB had a "deal" with the Saudis to keep gasoline prices low in the run-up to the election. The graphs show that prices were in fact unusually HIGH just before the election. Some deal! Another dreamed-up Leftist lie.

I have just put up here an impassioned article by Nathan Tabor about abortion. I don't wholly agree with it but it makes some interesting points.

I have just put up here a list of Left/Right differences as seen by a bipartisan observer.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Engels hated small farmers so much that he was prepared to go to war against them. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at John 14:6-13 ("I am in the Father, and the Father in me").

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

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