The spectre of thought

The following quote by Bertrand Russell is absolutely awesome and should be memorized by every single American.

"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."

Like my journalism professors of yore always said, "Have the courage to ask the hard questions. It's the only way to get the whole story."

The circus and why I don't take my children

Yeah, NOT taking one's children to the circus is as about as un-American as, say, not eating apple pie or refusing to sing the "Star Spangled Banner."

I do both of those -- with great gusto -- but I won't take my children to the circus and here's why.

Circuses abuse their animals. Period.

Everyone reading this likely knows about the radical and oftentimes nutty animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

I am not a member of PETA nor do I condone a lot of what they do in the name of animal protection. Frankly, I think they turn off more people than they recruit.

But when it comes to circuses and animal abuse, PETA has got the story and I, for one, hope they are able to convince those who need convincing that it's time to do away with this archane form of so-called entertainment. They have filed a petition with the US Dept. of Agriculture asking for the revocation or denial of the animal exhibitor license issued to Ringling Bros.

Many years ago, I had the privilege of writing and having published an opinion piece in the now-defunct Houston Post newspaper about the cruelties of the circus and why folks should think twice about bringing their children to see one.

I took apart all the popular arguments in favor of the circus because, well, none of those arguments hold water in the modern age.

Finally, I said then what I'll say now. If you see an elephant dancing on its hind legs, a bear riding a bicycle, or a tiger jumping through a ring of fire you can rest assured of the only fact you need to know: That animal endured horrific "training" to finally convince it that dancing, bike riding, or fire jumping was better than not performing.

I've explained this to my children and they get it. Now it's time for the rest of America to "get it" too.

For more information on animal abuse in circuses, you can simply google the topic. I warn you, though, that some of the video footage you'll be able to access is heartbreaking and brutal to watch. Make sure you need that degree of convincing before you click "play."

The quilt that was never sewn

I was talking with my mother today -- okay, not really talking, it was more like venting -- about my public education in grades 1-12 and then four more years at a state university.

I'd been reading the introductory remarks to a series of books that belonged to my late father, "Great Books of the Western World," edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler back in 1952.

The 54-volume set has either complete or excerpted writings from everyone from Homer and Plato all the way through Newton, Locke, Rousseau and Goethe to Darwin, Engels (yes, THAT Engels) and Freud.

Somewhere in the illustrious mix there are also works by Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, and Thomas Aquinas.

Poetry and prose -- religion, history, politics, art, literature, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, economics -- the books span the best (and worst) Western civilization has had to offer.

My father got the set years ago from a woman who worked for him. She'd committed suicide and my dad was one of the attorneys who tidied up matters related to her estate. In exchange for his help, the executor of the woman's will gave Dad the set of Great Books.

At the time, I couldn't understand why my dad wanted these books instead of money. I was in high school and when you're in high school money, any money, is a very coveted thing. It gets you stuff, right?

So why didn't my dad ask for payment in the form of cold, hard cash?

It's taken me nearly 30 years to realize the answer.

Proverbs 16:16 sums it up: "How much better to get wisdom than gold, to choose understanding rather than silver!"

My family has been homeschooling for four years even though we made this radical decision roughly ten years ago.

In the process of preparing to teach our own -- and in the process of actually teaching them -- I've come to understand just how much I lost as the result of my typical American public school education.

Regular readers know by now that I claim I lost time, lots and lots of time. That virtually everything I culled from my 12 years of public education that turned out to be useful could have been condensed into about five years.

These past four years, though, I've begun to realize that I lost something else. I say I lost it. The greater truth is that I never had it to begin with and I think I should have. I'll try to explain.

When I look back on the schooling I received, it looks like stacks and stacks of fabric squares -- the kind that people sew together to make a quilt. The squares are all different colors and patterns and they are set about in random piles.

Ostensibly they were to be pieced together in some sort of an aesthetically pleasing arrangement, just as you would expect to see on a finished quilt.

Instead, the squares were either sewn together haphazardly or they remain in distinct piles with no apparent relationship to each other or to the whole of the quilt.

In all my years of schooling, not one teacher ever bothered to attempt to show me that what I learned in This Class was somehow connected to what I would learn in That Class. The examples of this are endless, so I'll list a handful:

The study of astronomy necessarily includes the study of geometry.
The study of Shakespeare's play "Julius Caesar" needed an understanding of ancient Roman history.
The study of physics demanded an understanding of the evolution of thought from Aristotle to Newton to modern-day Stephen Hawking.
The study of Tennyson's poetry cried out for a foundation in the great myths and fairytales from which he drew his inspiration.

(This list assumes that I was exposed in any degree to any of the above things over the course of 12 years. I wasn't.)

The point is that everything we deem worth learning is interconnected with everything else -- the quilting squares sewn together make the quilt.

The problem for me is that my quilt was never sewn.

In looking for ways to help my children grasp the interconnectedness of all of human history with its monumental achievements and horrific failures, I have come to the conclusion that traditional contemporary education assumes that a scatter-shot approach to learning is sufficient.

A little of this and a little of that and somehow it is supposed to inspire in the majority of children a desire for life-long learning and a craving for conversations about the most significant issues of the past, present and future.

That last part sounds lofty and a bit unrealistic, doesn't it? After all, who has time to sit around and ponder the things that brought us to where we are today.

One need look no further than Congress to see the devastating effects of what happens when a people become ignorant of the principles and practices upon which their nation was born, when they fail to have the deeper discussions about the very essences of things like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

My American public education did very little to teach me what it means to be an American. I didn't read the Declaration of Independence until I took it upon myself to do so some five years after I graduated high school. I never studied the Constitution beyond knowing that the first ten amendments are called the Bill of Rights. I never wrote about either of these great documents, never discussed them in class or explored their significance. I was never assigned the biographies of great statesmen like Pericles, Julius Caesar, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Benjamin Franklin. I was never asked to read the Federalist Papers or to debate with any real depth of thought the most pressing and controversial events of modern times -- slavery in America, the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Japan, the civil rights movement. I never read the biographies or knew anything beyond birth/death dates and major discoveries of scientists like Archimedes, Isaac Newton, Antoine Lavoisier, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein or Clyde Tombaugh.

(Tombaugh, for those of you who, like me, received virtually no teaching in astronomy in school, is the American astronomer who discovered Pluto.)

What else did I never learn? I never learned that the various functions in math -- addition, subtraction, multiplication, division -- were interrelated. Now, it seems obvious, but then it was literally four different kinds of math rather than four variations on a theme.

I never learned the patterns of numbers, how they work in harmony in so many obvious and not-so-obvious ways. Would it really have taken a teacher that much time to point out that when we learn the multiplication tables we're really learning the skip-counts of 2's, 3's, 4's and so on?

Would geometry have been easier if instead of throwing formulas at me the teacher had taken time to introduce us to the world and ideas of Euclid and Archimedes? Yes! Would "pi" have been so mysterious if only I'd been taught how and why it came about? No!

Some 28 years after graduating high school I am finally picking up the various squares of information and inspecting them more closely. As I start to stitch them together, patterns are emerging.

Meanwhile,I spend endless hours helping my children sew their own quilts so that they, unlike me, won't look back someday and wonder exactly what they were supposed to learn and why they were supposed to learn it.

My dad's Great Books set gathered dust for a long time after he passed away because I was too stupid to divine their worth. Now that I know what they represent in terms of knowledge, I'm starting to use them with my kids.

Better late than never, some might say. I argue that it shouldn't have been late at all.

I leave you with a quote from the editors of the 1951 Great Books series:

"Education is supposed to have something to do with intelligence. It was because of this connection that it was always assumed that if the people were to have political power they would have to have education. They would have to have it if they were to use their power intelligently. This was the basis of the Western commitment to universal, free, compulsory education. I have suggested that the kind of education that will develop the requisite intelligence for democratic citizenship is liberal education, education through great books and the liberal arts, a kind of education that has all but disappeared from the schools, colleges, and universities of the United States. Why did this education disappear? It was the education of the Founding Fathers. It held sway until fifty years ago. Now it is almost gone."

Spilt water -- the girls of China

Longtime readers of my 'blog know where I stand when it comes to China's so-called "one child" policy. Initially hailed as the panacea for a burgeoning population some 30 years ago, the horrendous results of this well-intentioned but terribly shortsighted strategy are just now coming to light.

Below, are excerpts from the 4.10.10 UK's Daily Mail newspaper article by Peter Hitchens:

"In the cruel old China, baby girls were often left to die in the gutters. In the cruel modern China, they are aborted by the tens of millions, using all the latest technology.

Thanks to a state policy which has limited many families to one child since 1979, combined with an ancient and ruthless prejudice in favour of sons, the world's new superpower is beginning the century of its supremacy with an alarming surplus of males.

By the year 2020, there will be 30 million more men than women of marriageable age in this giant empire, so large and so different (its current population is 1,336,410,000) that it often feels more like a separate planet than just another country. Nothing like this has ever happened to any civilisation before.

There is an ugly new word for this mass slaughter: gendercide.

Three things are for sure. It cannot now be prevented, and it is already beginning to be obvious in the schools. It is also stimulating a miserable trade in stolen children.

The Chinese state, never having intended this result and increasingly alarmed by it, is now using all its huge propaganda resources to try to stop the slaughter of unborn girls.

But it will be hard to fight against the cold hard prejudice in favour of sons and against daughters, rooted in a prehistoric belief that sons will care for their aged parents while daughters will cost money in dowries, and desert to the families into which they marry. "

Hitchens then goes on to talk about his visits to several rural Chinese villages where he witnesses for himself the incredible imbalance between the numbers of girls and boys in community schools. Then he and his team head for the Chinese city of Kunming (pop. 6 million) where they enlist the help of a female friend. They ask her to visit various abortion clinics to find out the current thought on girls vs. boys.

"Yuan Quan slipped into a busy down-market establishment in a grim and basic part of town, with a flourishing market for stolen bicycles just outside, and the police looking the other way.

She asked the abortionist if he ever aborted boys. He gaped. 'Are you mad?' he almost shouted, 'Nobody aborts boys unless they are deformed. Girls are what we abort.'

Once you know more about China's attitude to girls, it is surprising that so many survive. Yuan Quan told me of her own experience: 'When I was a little girl my grandparents doted on me, and gave me generous presents. I was their first and only grandchild. But when my aunt had a son, it all stopped.

'The presents got much smaller and the fuss died away. My male cousin got all the attention. There was no pretence about it. They would always have much preferred a boy, and now they had one.

'They said to me, "You are only a girl. You are spilt water."' This cold, dismissive expression is universally used about unwanted daughters - and to their faces.

These were educated, urban people. Imagine, then, how much coarser and more brutal the attitude is in the villages or among the sweatshops where the poor and uneducated gather.

Only a century ago, historians recorded that such sayings as 'There is no thief like a family with five daughters' and 'Daughters are goods which lose you money' were common among Chinese peasants.

In Kunming I saw another of China's harsh faces. You may have seen pictures of children in cages, or tethered to posts, and gasped at the cruelty. But you did not know the half of it.

Their seemingly brutal parents are in fact trying to prevent their children from being stolen.

Boys are kidnapped by families who want a male heir and do not care where they get him. Girls are taken to be brought up as child brides for cherished, spoiled boys, who will not have to worry about the increasing shortage of girls.

What lingers in the mind, in the midst of this surging economic and political titan with its dozens of vast, ultra-modern cities, its advanced plans to land men on the Moon, its utopian schemes to control population and its unstoppable power over the rest of the world, is the inconsolable misery of the bereft parents, the pinched squalor of the places where they must try to live a happy life, the jaunty wickedness of the cheap abortion clinics and the classrooms full of the ghosts of all those girls who were never born.