He Is Not Coming

This occurred to me today and has occurred to me before, but today it occurred to me with greater force and, for the first time, it truly took hold.

He is not coming.

Who will be the next Reagan? Who will be our Thatcher? Who will show encroaching statism for the tyranny it is and turn the tide against it? Nevermind that Reagan and Thatcher, while they did make great gains, did not turn that tide permanently. We expect some even greater personage. The minute a promising face appears we ask, "Could it be? Is this the one?"

I tell you it isn't.

He is not coming.

We don't even bother to ask who our next Jefferson or Washington or Adams or Lincoln will be. We seem to have accepted that we have not produced one of these. Yet, that is what it would take, isn't it? At the very least anyway. Even then, who knows? Even that might not be enough.

He is not coming. And he is not coming because we have not produced him. From whence would he come? We are an ignorant people. Our best and brightest, outside of the hard sciences, are a sorry lot by historical standards. Intelligence, we have. Wit, we have in surplus. But knowledge? Real, discriminating knowledge, where is it? Our standards for knowledge are now so low. Now we are only required to sound as if we know. We are masters of rhetorical style, but of wisdom there is a dearth.

He is not coming. How many of us know Latin? How many Greek? How many are familiar with the great works of our civilization? Some will laugh at the suggestion that students should be troubled with Latin and Greek, but the fact is that it is impossible to be educated in our great works without these languages. When our nation was founded it was assumed that an educated person would be familiar with classical languages. Now they have been discarded.

He is not coming. What do we do with our brightest minds? How do we educate them? We polish them up, teach them to write prettily, and indoctrinate them into the idea that the highest form of wisdom is total ignorance. What I mean by that is that we teach them to value non-discrimination above all else. Total refusal to discriminate between ideas on their merits is now the mark of the sage. Any civilization is just one of many. Any idea is just one of many. Any religion is just one of many. Any philosophy is just one of many. Everything is relative and everything is deserving of respect. (Unless, of course, it is successful like Christianity or capitalism.)

He is not coming, and he is not coming because he can never come from that lie. The heart of relativism is a void of tyrannical ignorance. What is worth knowing if everything is, at heart, the same? Liberty is tyranny. Freedom is statism. We throw our greatest minds into that abyss.

He is not coming because, though they are total aberrations historically, we believe liberty and comfort inevitable. They are not. We are comfortable because by liberty success is found by merit. As ideas and things and people succeed by merit, we become more comfortable. But when you replace merit as the means of success, you will, by and by, find yourself less comfortable. When statism encroaches on liberty and planning and pull replace merit, tyranny and misery are not far behind. There will always be men who love power and seek to consolidate it, and mostly, they are not benevolent. To think that a state can have great power and yet be free of malice is to be naive at best and willfully foolish at worst. To believe that mere men, no matter how great, are capable of knowing all means and seeing all ends and can, therefore, plan for all is the very same folly.

He is not coming because we are lazy. We desire virtue, but we are too distracted to practice it, and so we outsource it to the state. Help him who needs it!... But not by me; let the bureaucrats handle that. We are like children depending on our parents to take care of the hard realities of life. He can never come out of that because he cannot be a child.

He is not coming. He will not speak for us. He does not exist, and nothing will be set aright until we produce him.

It remains to be seen whether or not we will.

Is That Really a Picture of Springdale?

I live here, and I suppose I must never have looked in that direction.

Free Foreign Service Institute Language Programs

Welcome to fsi-language-courses.com, the home for language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute. These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain.

Everything from French and Spanish to Kituba and Igbo. The reviews I've read about this program have said that while it is rather boring, it does work.

I've used Pimsleur in the past, but I'm going to give an FSI course a try.

Helpful Link for Arkansas Homeschoolers

This. Perhaps everyone else already knew about this, but I didn't, so I'll add it to the sidebar.

Also, for Catholic homeschoolers in Northwest Arkansas, I've heard great things about this group. I found the other link while looking for information on how to join.

When Was That Written? Now?

And good literature is the natural result of that sane outlook which only comes from a share in the active life of humanity and a living conviction of the significance of daily toil, of words and deeds and human relationships, and, above all, of the beauty of the world, and from a living faith too in God, and the triumph of Good over Evil. As soon as men cease themselves to live, and only write, the effect is evident in a certain lack of virility in their outlook. Feeling degenerates into sentimentality.

No. But it could have been. This part, "As soon as men cease themselves to live, and only write, the effect is evident in a certain lack of virility in their outlook," reminds me of most modern writing. And as for this, "Feeling degenerates into sentimentality," she left off that sentimentality often degenerates into irony which often then degenerates into flippancy.

School Envy

I've wondered about this before: what sorts of things trigger homeschool kids to envy their public and private school counterparts? Wonder no more. (I especially like the kid who wanted to go to school so that he could eat out of a lunch box.) Good tips for handling these short bouts of envy as well.

True story: When I was four years old, I wanted to be an apple picker because I saw something that depicted apple pickers as riding bikes and carrying ladders at the same time. Bikes and ladders! At the same time! What could be better than that?

I Always Loved Geometry

My geometry teacher's name was Ms. Burke, and she was excellent. I think she has a different name now.

I used to sit in her class and imagine all the lines on the board extending out into infinity. (If they didn't extend out into infinity, we learned, they wouldn't be lines; they'd be segments.) I'd imagine where different ones would meet. If I drew a line on my paper, I'd imagine it continuing out into the room. I could turn the paper and the ghost line would turn too. I'd imagine all the lines everyone else was drawing at their desks, as though we were all sitting in a web. And what if all the line segments that made up the chairs and binders and all the other objects in the room extended out into infinite lines? Lines everywhere, up and down, side to side, diagonally in every possible way (But would it really be every possible way? Certainly not, I thought.) and moving as our doings moved them. And planes, they were infinite too. The counters, the desks, the books, the overhead projector, what if they all extended out into infinity? You could imagine them moving around like gigantic transparencies that pierced the walls and the ceiling and the floor.

Maybe everything did extend out like that in true reality, in the reality of Platonic forms, and we just saw the limited physical representations. Could we affect those forms? I could erase an arrow, the indication of a line extending out forever, in my geometry notes and replace it with a point. That was a full stop. If I stopped the line at a certain point, then it was stopped. Now it was a ray. But somehow it was still infinite. Wouldn't it have to be half as long as a line? And how odd that you could place a point anywhere on a line, and it would be the center. You could place one point and then travel along the line ten million miles out into space to place another point, and as far as the length of the line was concerned, it was as though those ten million miles were nothing at all, and both points were the center. And what happened to the lines as they went on forever? Was forever really forever or would the space curve back in on itself. Would the two ends go on so far that they would run into each other and made a loop?

We didn't study that, so I don't know.

The 179th Carnival of Homeschooling...

... is up.

Blog Worth a Bookmark

This looks like a relatively new blog. Here's a representative post titled Literature Curricula for Preschoolers.

I'm impressed. Few people are comprehensive without rambling, and this appears to be one such person.

Cheap Montessori Materials

We've started using some traditional Montessori materials at home. I guess you could call it home preschooling.

I've seen plenty of people in forums wondering what online stores have decent and inexpensive materials. I've ordered from these two, and I was happy with both places:

Kid Advance: I got sandpaper letters and numbers from this store and thought the quality was excellent. I'd seen what seemed to be identical letters and numbers elsewhere, but for higher prices. I think Kid Advance may be the actual manufacturer.

Adena Montessori: I got a variety of materials from this store including cylinder blocks, a geometric cabinet, a small movable alphabet, golden beads, color tablets, and small number rods. Again, I was pleased. Adena may also be a manufacturer.

Of course, you don't necessarily have to buy materials. There are quite a few that can be made at home. There are directions for making many traditional materials in this book.

I've never really done any crafting, but I'm attempting to make something from that book: cards with numbers on them. Heh. Well, you have to start somewhere, right?

ADDED: I forgot to mention Hobby Lobby. If you have one of these in your area, it is a wonderland of useful items for preschool. Plus, if you do want to make Montessori materials on your own, you can find pretty much everything you need in this store.