portrait-photo

The Wunderkammer of the Mild Colonial Boy, Esq., a Reactionary Tory Gentleman, who armed only with a Steampowered Babbage Engine and Pure Intentions, wanders the Time Streams and Aetheric Plane gathering an Eccentric Hodgepodge of Curiousities, Frivolities, Whimsicalities and Nonsense.

Q. Why is your Tumblelog called "My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning"?

A. Because "My Grandmother's Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning" wouldn't fit in the available space.

atompunk: lostsplendor: “Training in marksmanship helps girls at Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles develop into responsible women. Part of Victory Corps activities there, rifle practice encourages girls to be accurate in handling firearms. Practicing on the rifle range in the school’s basement.” August, 1942 (via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive) Marksmanship and Home Economics - just the combination.

atompunk:

lostsplendor:

“Training in marksmanship helps girls at Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles develop into responsible women. Part of Victory Corps activities there, rifle practice encourages girls to be accurate in handling firearms. Practicing on the rifle range in the school’s basement.” August, 1942 (via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive)

Marksmanship and Home Economics - just the combination.

"By and large, though, the boys were taught by their mother….She had the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Redpath Library, a hundred volumes of Greek and Roman literature, Shakespeare, Dickens, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Kipling, Twain. She taught her sons French, Latin, and a bit of Greek. She read to them from books in German, translating as she went along. They read the Iliad and the Odyssey."

— John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), p. 337, on the education of geologist John David Love (1913-2002) and his brother Allan on the family ranch in Wyoming.
(HT http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/home-schooling.html)

Russia’s Little Girls

“The Moscow Girls’ Cadet Boarding School is one of the new elite military academies in Russia. While most kids hate school for boring maths or history, the classes here include stripping down an AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle. And the girls can do it in the time it takes most kids to send an SMS. With a curriculum that includes drill, arms, first aid and federal law, one might expect it to turn into little Amazons. But femininity is also highly valued, so the evenings are reserved for such activities as sewing, ballet and compulsory choir practice. There are no mini-skirts and swear words, no smoking and drinking, and no hanging about unattended. Mobile phones are also banned except for a few minutes a day to talk with parents. A traditional Russian Winter Ball gives the girls a rare chance to meet the opposite sex, in this case from a nearby all-male boarding school boarding school called Moscow Cossacks Cadet Corps - another military-style academy founded during the Putin years.”

Now this is an educational reform I’d like to see in Australia. Unlike the seminaries for socialism that you see here.

(Source: gunrunnerhell, via blackpignotebook)

triflesandparsnips:

educating the young: you are doing it right.

my-ear-trumpet: John Randolph (1804/1805) by Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828) Oil on canvas, 73.6 x 61 cm (29 x 24 in.) National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) (Andrew W. Mellon Collection) (image from Wikipedia ) Among the strange notions which have been broached since I have been in the political theatre, there is one which has lately seized the minds of men, that all things must be done for them by the Government, and that they are to do nothing for themselves: the Government is not only to attend to the great concerns which are its province, but it must step in and ease individuals of their natural and moral obligations. A more pernicious notion can not prevail. Look at that ragged fellow staggering from the whiskey shop, and see that slattern who has gone there to reclaim him; where are their children? Running about, ragged, idle, ignorant, fit candidates for the penitentiary. Why is all this so? Ask the man and he will tell you. “Oh, the Government has undertaken to educate our children for us. It has given us a premium for idleness, and now I spend in liquor which I should otherwise be obliged to save, to pay for their schooling.” ~~John Randolph. Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention (1830)

my-ear-trumpet:

John Randolph (1804/1805) by Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828) Oil on canvas, 73.6 x 61 cm (29 x 24 in.) National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) (Andrew W. Mellon Collection) (image from Wikipedia )

Among the strange notions which have been broached since I have been in the political theatre, there is one which has lately seized the minds of men, that all things must be done for them by the Government, and that they are to do nothing for themselves: the Government is not only to attend to the great concerns which are its province, but it must step in and ease individuals of their natural and moral obligations. A more pernicious notion can not prevail. Look at that ragged fellow staggering from the whiskey shop, and see that slattern who has gone there to reclaim him; where are their children? Running about, ragged, idle, ignorant, fit candidates for the penitentiary. Why is all this so? Ask the man and he will tell you. “Oh, the Government has undertaken to educate our children for us. It has given us a premium for idleness, and now I spend in liquor which I should otherwise be obliged to save, to pay for their schooling.” ~~John Randolph. Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention (1830)

(via )

thecounterrevolutionary: Public Education | Public Indoctrination

thecounterrevolutionary:

Public Education | Public Indoctrination

(via thecounterrevolutionary-deactiv)

"Margolis would ask each student to take a special assignment, such as a particular version or commentary and be responsible for its evidence. He told me on my first day in class to handle the Syriac version. ‘But I don’t know Syriac,’ I protested. He looked at me sternly and growled, ‘Where do you think you are? In a kindergarten? Go home and learn Syriac.’"

—

Cyrus Gordon, quoted in Leonard Greenspoon, Max Leopold Margolis: A Scholar’s Scholar (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), p. 35.

(HT Laudator Temporis Acti via Helen Rittelmeyer’s Twitter)

"In older education the teacher was measured by what he or she could do with a bright girl or boy… For the first time in the history of education teaching came to be measured, not by what could be done with the best, but by what could be done with the worst."

— Richard Powers, qtd. by Douglas Wilson in Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning (via joshbishopreads)

(via gloriesofthewest)

"Once, I remember, long before my book was written, when I was listening to some young American educators who were all agog over this-or-that new wrinkle in curricular gadgetry, I said, perhaps with some impatience, that the Ratio Studiorum of Acquaviva had been doing very well by itself for a little matter of three hundred years or so, and if any one had ever suggested any valid essential improvements on it, or could do so now, he was just the man I should like to see. I got no takers. It turned out that these educators had not heard of the Ratio Studiorum, and I suspect they were not quite sure whether Acquaviva was the hero of Rossini’s opera or the name of a Pullman car."

—

Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945), Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1964), p. 88.

(HT Laudator Temporis Acti)

"I think I learned quite early that the judgments of my teachers were probably a report of their ignorance. In truth, my education was a systematic misleading. Ruskin was dismissed as a dull, preacherly old fart who wrote purple prose. In a decent society the teacher who led me to believe this would be tried, found guilty, and hanged by the thumbs while being pelted with old eggs and cabbage stalks"

—

Guy Davenport’s essay “On Reading” in The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (Washington: Counterpoint, 1997), pp. 19-31.

(from Laudator Temporis Acti | A Systematic Misleading)