The cure for common education?

Could the idea with the funny name -- Waldorf -- be it?

Could this be the cure for that which is wrong with education in the U.S. -- schools in which the students feel and act as if they are in prison -- teachers who dare not leave a coffee cup unguarded lest the inma -- er, students -- defile or poison it -- and learning that is as ephemereal and elusive as a rainbow?

Meanwhile, I am told that children in Africa walk for miles to sit on a dirt floor in a boiling-hot, tin-roof shack with the barest of supplies, so hungry are they to learn.

I am intrigued by a public school concept in which love of learning is intrinsic to the curriculum, in which personal character is integral, in which a foundation is laid for a lifetime love of intellectual development and in which the classroom connects to the real world.

I myself love to learn. I read hard books, old books. I watch documentaries on everything from World War II to the bulldog ants of Australia. I enjoy participating in the great pageant of life.

I'm no prodigy, no genius, by any stretch of the imagination. I am not a know-it-all, either, I am a want-to-know-it-all. God gave you and I our brains for a reason. It is natural to want to learn -- watch a toddler exploring his or Her world sometime and you can't help but realize that.

So what happens? They go to school. They encounter bullies, boors and boredom. They discover that learning is not cool and playing down their natural intelligence is the way to survive socially. What should be a thrill -- classic literature, mathematics, the history of the world -- is made into a chore and becomes loathsome -- left behind gratefully upon graduation.

Whatever person, philosophy or organization kills the desire to learn, blights a human life and threatens civilization.

http://www.edutopia.org/waldorf-public-school-morse

Five things wrong ...

Five things wrong with the U.S.of A. today:

1. A society based on the rule of law is a Roman innovation, and a brilliant one, a bulwark against tyranny of the minority or the majority. Thus, in history, law codes gradually supplanted tribal justice and the use of community shaming in order to maintain a sense of morality. However, relying wholly on the rule of law can cause a problem: No one fears to offend, or feels shame in violating, mere ink and paper scribblings. If the law is not "written in our hearts," we have a problem. Rule of law also spawns legions of lawyers making their fortunes trying to outwit it, and keeps legislators in a constant battle to keep up with the latest outrages, from cell phones while driving to the plague of underage "s$xting." Basic shame is so very old-fashioned.

2. Education. I sound like some wheezy old grandfather, but there are countries in the world in which children walk for miles each day to sit in some hovel of a building with the barest rudiments of educational materials, so hungry are they to learn. By contrast, most American children consider "school" akin to prison and being devoted to learning horribly "uncool." Also, far from being the respected sage he/she once was, today's teacher must constantly walk on eggshells lest he/she be sued, and runs the risk of poisoning if he/she leaves a coffee cup unguarded in the classroom.

3. Economy. It's based on an ever expanding cycle of exploitation, a sort of pyramid scheme with Earth as collateral and all of us as eventual suckers. This is certainly not solely an American problem. And world socialism proved no better, even much worse, than capitalism, at resolving this dillema. There is a problem when prosperity depends on wringing more and more crops out of more and more exhausted soil, on building more and more gas stations and shopping malls where forests once grew, on constantly taking, taking, taking. That problem is that eventually, the soil is dead, the forests are gone and the minerals are all extracted and shipped away. You can only eat so many potato chips out of a bag before it becomes empty and useless.

4. Two-party system. These days, it's becoming more like one and a half. I am quite aware of the flaws of parliamentary rule in other lands, where coalitions constantly form and break up, and centrist parties can be at the mercy of wacky loons and fringe parties. But I am emphatically neither a Democrat nor a strong Republican so I am in essence left out of the political process, forced each election to choose one or the other of people I more and more like less and less.

5. Losing touch. We are losing touch with history. Go to Mt. Vernon and you will find out how long it has been since a sitting U.S. president bothered to visit our first president's estate, a stone's throw from Washington D.C. We are also losing touch with nature. And we are losing touch with the values taught in our mostly agrarian past: Love for the land, self-reliance, a sense of the seasons, hard work, love for hard work, patience in adversity and even delayed gratification -- corn doesn't grow in a week unless you are playing Farmtown on Facebook.

Juvenal, translation and education

Tonight I began to read Juvenal -- Decimus Junius Juvenal -- one of the last of the classical Romans to write before the Christian Age triumphed in Europe.

He lived from about 55 A.D. to about 140 A.D.

As I have read the great books of antiquity, translations of course, I have become interested in the men and women who performed this service, who did the translating.

Thus, of course, with Juvenal, who didn't speak English, since the Angles were still in Germany in his day, still basically being Germans, and therefore the words in which I think and speak did not yet exist.

My edition of Juvenal's works was translated by one Dr. Peter Green, born the same year as my own grandfather. Dr. Green was -- or is, if he still lives -- an Englishman, London-born. He may have walked on some of the same stones that Juvenal did nearly 2000 years before, if the tradition can be trusted that Juvenal performed military service in then-Roman Britain. Ironically, after spending some years in Greece, Dr. Green settled in Austin, Texas, where he taught at the University of Texas. Texas, Cowboy Country USA, land of lariats and barbecue, dust devils and hellish humidity -- I can't imagine a place less like England.

And yet, that is ever the glory and the folly of an Englishman -- fervently loyal to Albion and the Crown, yet born to wander the world and to seek to change it along the way. The Union Jack once waved from Hong Kong to Tasmania, Virginia to India -- and it still flies over Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands and other places hundreds, even thousands of miles from the homeland.

In his youth, good professor Green received the type of education one just does not hear about anymore -- the sort that was scathingly deplored by Joyce in "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," alternately praised and pilloried by the late C.S. Lewis and soundly mocked by Pink Floyd: "When we were young and went to school ..."

Writes Green: "I first became acquainted with Juvenal through the good offices of Mr. A.L. Irvine, my late sixth-form master, who -- with what I took at the time, wrongly, to be pure sadistic relish -- set us to translate [Juvenal's] Satire X aloud, unseen, and afterwards made us learn long stretches of it by heart, together with parallel passages from Dr. Johnson's 'The Vanity of Human Wishes.'

"But in fact, of course, this was by far the best introduction to a notoriously difficult poet that one could hope for."

That sort of scholastic torture/discipline enabled Lewis to enjoy the classics in their original tongues all his life, and, obviously, served Dr. Green as well. But for better or for worse, that method of education has vanished from the Western world.

I do not yearn for a stiff old schoolmaster to bruise my knuckles, for bad meals of thin broth and dry meat -- but oh, to have had the classic languages drilled into me as a youth, instead of being forced to rely on the translations of others!