News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I'm hanging out this week in Dallas at the conference hosted by the Society for Classical Learning. It's been great to spend a few days with teachers and administrators committed to a rich vision of education. There is a lot of energy and enthusiasm around forming students in the virtues necessary to serve their communities well in the years to come. (I also passed out 150 advanced copies of The Liberating Arts, which was a delightful task.)
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about the commons, alfalfa, and oats.
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Casey Spinks remembers the enigmatic life of Cormac McCarthy: "Cormac McCarthy’s work is full of death, and dreams dashed, and despair, and darkness. But therein is a light—the slightest light, so dim, each flicker giving doubt whether it will hold. But it is there. And it promises salvation. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot comprehend it."
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Kirkpatrick Sale insists we need to break big units into smaller places: "There's no place that division would not make things better. I don't say utopian, just better."
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Zephram Foster recounts his gratitude for his small town, despite its very real challenges: "Unlike many I grew up with, I’m proud to be an Oklahoman. I’m proud to have a family heritage that is tied to a place and has roots in a community. I’m proud of a community, however flawed, that has an identity and a passion for keeping itself as honest and pure as possible."
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Nadya Williams commends the difficulty--and hence the real rewards--of deep learning: "Reading ancient languages requires slow and careful thinking and processing of a sort that we do not normally utilize in our pressure-cooker fast-consumer world."
In a 1944 essay titled “Which Are the Liberating Arts?” John Herman Randall Jr. raises many of the same questions that continue to elicit discussion in educational circles today. He’s not worried about AI and coding, but about the machine world that WWII brought to the fore:
We are succeeding pretty well in training competent technicians, men who know how to do some one thing with great skill—-and who know very little else, not even why they are doing what they are doing so competently. The universal reports from our armed forces seem to indicate that their members show almost no understanding of why they are manipulating their marvelous gadgets and applying their remarkable techniques so effectively. This is to say nothing of the lack of comprehension and vision displayed by the men responsible for our really breath-taking peacetime techniques.
Dr. A. D. Lindsay, Master of Balliol College, Oxford lecturing in this country last year, described with powerful effect the state of mind of German airmen shot down and made prisoners of war in England. They showed almost uniformly an extraordinary competence in the technical arts for which they had been trained. At the same time they seemed to be wholly uneducated; they were completely unaware of reasons for what they were doing, and accepted their military orders without question.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro