Coleman’s Nihilistic Pedagogy Morse Peckham’s non-final Answer The Instability of “Meaning” GOP Rep. Dr. Paul Broun (GA) offers an example asserting a “Young Earth” Answer Jim’s goodness as answer to all of this (Huckleberry Finn) *** When I got to it Jim was setting there with his head down between his knees, asleep, with his [...]
Tag Archives: power
Discipline and Punish
Maybe you’re not 44 and so are not conversant with the movie Reality Bites (its genesis and presentation 20 years past), but I am. The down-and-out 20-something “losers” (heed my punctuation, please) in that film did not exemplify me. I had a job as an English teacher in a parochial high school in St. Louis, [...]
Instructed to Ignorance
I started out thinking I could assert that the school curriculum (the “what” of instruction) is irrelevant but that is of course not what I would mean to say. Rather, curriculum is ALL possible responses to all possible utterances.* That means the space of instruction (fancy critical theory calls this the “scene”)–home, church, playground, friend’s [...]
Talking Testing Aggression
My immodest wish is to pass on to my readers the same sense of intellectual contradiction and incoherence I feel in myself, the acceptance of which is, it may be, our only real excuse for hope. *** To utter a challenge to a group of peers by demanding acceptance in that group, or to challenge [...]
The Wages of Progress…
People get interested and involved in issues and dilemmas that primarily affect them personally, physically, specifically. I get that. Me too. Yo tambien. However, it seems to me that a particular injustice or unfairness normally has tentacles that seek to attach themselves in myriad sucking ways to all aspects of life generally. The recent arbitrary [...]
The Money Virtue As American Rational Religion
The most virtuous and honest character in Dickens’ Hard Times, Stephen Blackpool, often confronts the confusion, ambiguity, paradox, and unfairness of “interests” with an aggrieved and exasperated cry that “it’s all such a muddle.” Even his virtuous acts of self-protection are disallowed by law, but the law is one that restricts the impoverished while it [...]
Tenure Perches in the Soul
I. “Hope” is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune–without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I’ve heard it in the chillest land, And [...]
Seeking the Safety of Certainty: Totalitarian Minds in Religion and Science
Guiding my thinking is the very clear recognition that I am nearly always a partialist who at times spouts a partialism that upon reflection seems a tad embarrassing. I know some things fairly well in the sense that I have repetitive experience of certain things as well as having studied certain things with some depth [...]
Hazlitt on Coriolanus: Poetry of Power
As there is a movie staring Ralph Fiennes, or Voldemort to you youngsters, (who also directs) coming out based on Coriolanus I thought I’d share what is perhaps the greatest English essayist, William Hazlitt, on the Tragedy of Caius Martius. Here is how the essay opens: Shakespear [sic] has in this play shewn himself well [...]
The Stone of Life Need Roll Nowhere
I am a relaxed person. Until I read the newspaper, or see links from Facebook posts, telling me what is being done around me. You see, I like not doing anything. That doesn’t mean I don’t work; I feel this writing is a kind of work maybe something Donald Hall terms “life work”: the work [...]
