Change

Yes, You Can Change. If You Must.

Spiked has a pretty good article on the subject of change, and how it distracts.

Present educational fads are based on the premise that because we live in a new, digitally driven society, the intellectual legacy of the past and the experience of grown-ups have little significance for the schooling of children.

The implicit assumption that adults have little to teach children is rarely made explicit. But there is a growing tendency to flatter children through suggesting that their values are more enlightened than those of their elders because they are more tuned in to the present. So children are often represented as digital natives who are way ahead of their text-bound and backward-looking parents.

Well, people look backwards with their minds for the same reason they look in three dimensions with their eyes: because that's the only way the organ works.

A useful English Lit project would be to grab up the Louis L'amour novels and run through them for the literary references; and then make a class that required students to read those books he cites. (And to read them in the manner he recommends: for example, to read Plutarch's 'lives' at least three times.) Ivanhoe. Shakespeare. Blackstone's legal commentaries. So many others!

A useful philosophy project would be to grab up those same novels by the man, and have the students read L'amour directly. What did he mean to say about life? About manhood? About duty? About honor? About the right way to live, and how best to learn?

I looked for his books in the local public library. Even in rural Georgia, there were only two of them in the collection.

It's OK, though: the truck stop down the road sells a neverending supply. Truckers have a lot of time to think, like cowboys riding trail. When the rest of it falls apart, they'll still be there.