I suppose if you take the “racist” out our Headmaster’s “3Rs”, we’d be on the right track.
After I retired more or less from the world of High Tech, I decided to supplement my meager social security and savings with tutoring and being a substitute teacher. I had a revelation a few days ago right after I finished a few months of actual in class instruction in the very upscale county north of San Francisco known as Marin. Let me be clear. This is a very woke county. I’m guessing about 90% white. But that doesn’t stop the local school districts from making sure that Critical Race Theory is firmly entrenched in the curriculum. You know, white people no matter how poor are the “Oppressors” and any Bi Poc – Black Indigenous Person of Color is “Oppressed” – that goes for Barack, Michelle and especially Kamala!
I have to say that these parents of these “Oppressors” are so woke they’re completely asleep while their offspring are taught to hate themselves and their country. Oh, yes, my revelation. I said to myself – let’s turn the barn into a theater and do our Musical Play! No that was Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. What I said to myself was – let’s start our own school! And first order of business is to expose Critical Race Theory for the racist garbage it is. Instead let’s start a school based on the concept of traditional Judeo-Christian values. You know, the values of our founders. The ones who were predominantly Protestant, merchant class, who gave us the Declaration of Independence – “all men are created equal” and the Bill of Rights – freedom of speech. And when I found this organization ACCS – the Association of Classic Christian Schools, I discovered the perfect curriculum for that school based on the mesmerizing essay from a very non-woke author Dorothy Sayers – from a speech she gave at Oxford in 1947. And it gets worse. Not only is this essay over 70 years old, she focuses on concepts that date back to the Middle Ages – what that is exactly escapes me, but needless to say, it’s a long time ago. She makes the case for things like Latin and Mathematics where students first learn multiplication tables. A dead language and simply learning to add subtract divide and multiply through wrote memory? Tell me it ain’t so. And worst of all, she discusses that the end goal of this form of education is not to simply become a specialist but to actually be able to think for oneself. How absurd!
Here are a few quotes…you can see what I mean:
“Is it not the great defect of our education to-day (—a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—) that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think?”
“For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.”
To this I add Big Media – Big Tech – the hypnotic and brainwashing effect of Social Media – for the express purpose to not just sell soap as Advertising does – but literally control whole masses of individuals unable to think for themselves.
“Latin should be begun as early as possible—at a time when inflected speech seems no more astonishing than any other phenomenon in an astonishing world; and when the chanting of “amo, amas, amat” is as ritually agreeable to the feelings as the chanting of “eeny, meeny, miney, mo.””
“I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar. I say this, not because Latin is traditional and mediæval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least 50 percent. It is the key to the vocabulary and structure of all the Romance languages and to the structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilisation, together with all its historical documents.”
“We have lost the tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.” What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labour, if at the close the chief object is left unattained?…”
“…it is as well that anything and everything which can usefully be committed to memory should be memorised at this period, whether it is immediately intelligible or not. The modern tendency is to try and force rational explanations on a child’s mind at too early an age. Intelligent questions, spontaneously asked, should, of course, receive an immediate and rational answer; but it is a great mistake to suppose that a child cannot readily enjoy and remember things that are beyond its power to analyse—particularly if those things have a strong imaginative appeal (as, for example, Kubla Khan), an attractive jingle (like some of the memory rhymes for Latin genders), or an abundance of rich, resounding polysyllables (like the Quicunque Vult).”
To this I add: hence, during the period where Children are sponges and can easily memorize – use this period not to explain these more complicated questions, but to form the basis to learn Latin – and I believe will make it easier later when they reach the developmental stage where they will be able to analyze and think for themselves…Piaget and other Child Development Psychologists would agree.
“The grammar of Mathematics begins, of course, with the multiplication table, which, if not learnt now, will never be learnt with pleasure; and with the recognition of geometrical shapes and the grouping of numbers. These exercises lead naturally to the doing of simple sums in arithmetic; and if the pupil shows a bent that way, a facility acquired at this stage is all to the good. More complicated mathematical processes may, and perhaps should, be postponed, for reasons which will presently appear.”
To this I add…When you analyze what Common Core is especially as it applies to Math – it is nothing but making processes more complicated “putting the cart before the horse” – confusing not just the student but by my experience the teacher as well…math teachers in CA are forced to do their best to learn it but in the end the students who excel have learned their math facts multiplication tables etc. And Common Core has done little more than confuse the average student whose time would have been better spent learning times tables and other math facts crucial first steps in learning fractions, algebra and higher math.
I am going to attempt the monumental task of starting the Dorothy Sayers School of Northern California. Donations welcome.