An audio recording by Doug Storm of selections of The Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin. (duration approximately 18 minutes) from Leaving Boston from Arrival in Philadelphia from Arriving at Moral Perfection *** from Leaving Boston At…
you searched for doing nothing
Coerced Silence
In some post somewhere near the beginning of my blogging with an intentional focus on “education,” in attempts to define and understand it as a social system as well as in attempts to discover the…
Writing Instruction Grounding Social Control
Those of us who have been teachers and/or wannabe authors before everyone was an author (see the note yesterday re: artists)–I know I’m treading on my commoner sensibility here, always a tension in me–remember there…
Schools (Don’t?) Matter, (Nor) Does Creativity?
Okay, I’ll confess to being less than tactful most of the time. But I gotta tell you, I’m pretty tired of one particular complaint that I hear (rather, read) again and again on education sites…
Empty of Fact: Rachel Brown’s Bellwether Propaganda
I asked Doug Martin, my colleague at The Common Errant and a dogged investigator of politico-corporate-educational malfeasance, to help us interpret the misleading graphic presentation offered by Rachel Brown for The Atlantic‘s Reform Pamphlet. Ms Brown seems…
Listening to Literature, or Hearing Hard Words
I believe I’ve said somewhere else that I really only discovered a “fecundity” of thinking in myself* when I started listening to audiobooks while walking. You know how you need to justify reading to yourself…
Thou Vain Toy
For Bobby C., underlinings from an essay by Morse Peckham, “Man’s Use of Nature,” offering powder and ball to my NO! in thunder. And, perhaps as expected, Ahab will have the last word. *** An…
Extreme Thinking Errors: Tough-Love Christian Boarding Schools and the Indiana Department of Child Services
The following is a revised version of an article which appeared at the Common Errant in July 2012. I have re-written it for my upcoming book, Hoosier School Heist, which will be released in December. …
Iniquitous Airy Abstraction, or The Lawyer’s Truth
Having neither the wherewithal nor the erudition (nor the patience, nor expectation of readership) to craft a cogent article on the fact that Western civilization as represented by governments and ideologies serving “manifest destiny” as…
Extirpate these Savages
D. H. Lawrence on our Founding Paternalist Improver, Benjamin Franklin! The ways of Ben’s Providence suits the Improver God in Mammon and Genocide. Be attentive. This is America Singing still. Can’t you hear it in…