I don’t know how to tell you this; we’re getting our asses handed to us on a platter. By we, I mean those of us who are against the corporate school reform movement. My friend Brian recently challenged me to simply offer one thing I could do in a “protest” fashion that would have a goal that I might achieve by my actions. This is…
A Union of Love and Friendship
The Errant offers words on love and friendship from Massachusetts in honor of a ceremonial inerrancy. “This union…by which two lives are one, this sweet and strange adoption wherein we can but look, and are not yet admitted, how it can fill the heart, and make it gang wildly beating, how it will take us one day, and make us all it’s own, and we…
Eye (DARPA) in the Sky: Uncle Sam To Convert To Yahweh
From Emerson’s book “Nature”: Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball-I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me-I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to…
Homo Moronus: Institutionalizing Ignorance One Voucher at a Time
Michael Dirda, book reviewer extraordinaire, opens his essay review on Jenny Uglow’s “The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World” this way: “In the time of the Lunar men science and art were not separated: you could be an inventor and designer, an experimenter and a poet, a dreamer and an entrepreneur all at once.” Lunar men? Is this some science fiction vision–a…
Hedges’ CBC Interview on Occupy Wall Street: 7 Minutes of Media Anatomy
My friend Chad posted a Youtube video of Chris Hedges (you read his work, right?) discussing the Occupy Wall Street situation and Hedges’ “involvement” in it with a CBC morning show called “Lang and O’Leary”. It’s very worth your time for many reasons. Here’s the CBC link to the exchange (no need to “tube” it), you will have to put up with 15 seconds of…
Brave Thinkers? Peter Thiel wants to buy your kid’s ideas. Brilliant!
Okay, I subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly, but I’m not sure why. If it weren’t for James Fallows I would not even breathe a positive sigh in its direction. Mostly I see it as an indicator of how far we’ve fallen as thinking creatures. I mean, they publish, promote and pay Jeffrey Goldberg. One might be a bit melancholy about this–The Atlantic is one of…
Occupy Wall Street: A Sit-in Defining Being Against the Doing
Two bits, more than a shave and haircut, on the “unrest” that appears to be morphing nicely into actual thought. Both of these from the web magazine The New Significance: “A web magazine exploring revolutionary forces for change & autonomy in the 21st Century…” The first comes from David Harvey on the London riots in early August. (For “Thatcherism” below you can replace with “Reaganism”…
New After School Program Should Be Full Day Model
This is a “local” post, but don’t dismiss it–think how it might apply to the schools in your community. What follows is, in full, an article from today’s Herald Times intended to “color in” some new education policy details and effects in the Monroe County Community School Corporation (MCCSC). It is a sunny report titled, “After-school program gives Bloomington North students extra time, help with…
In Praise of Life Work: Against Jobs
Today, walking the dogs, air heavy with a cold mist, moving up a gentle grade into the rising sun, trees in autumn raiment, yellow and fading reds, my eyes are on the road ahead, yet unfocused, not really looking at anything, but ahead of me a Native American (what tribe?) waits in a crouch at the top of the swell. The thought, a vision, unreal,…
Sunday Sermon: (Nobel) Prizing Doing
What are people for? This is the title of a book of essays by Wendell Berry (and one of the essays within). I’d say people are not generally for anything. But that is probably not an acceptable answer. Kant insisted, and all I know of Kant is this, that one categorical imperative is that humans must be seen as ends in themselves and never as…