Quote for the day: Tellers of our own story

"Christians are going to have to become better tellers of our own story. Young people are not going to be argued into Christian chastity or browbeaten by moralistic maxims. Beauty and goodness, embodied in great art and fiction, and in the lives of ordinary Christians, married and single, is the only thing that stands a chance.

"If we don't do it, the culture will do it for us." ~~ Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option

Good reading for today: Teacher or technology?

"Geoff Shullenberger, writing in Dissent magazine, suggests that in promoting Massive Open Online Courses, "We are remaking education around information technology, rather than using information technology as a pedagogical tool. This is a 21st Century version of what Paulo Freire called the 'banking method of education,' a model that Deweyan humanists and practitioners of critical pedagogy have long repudiated as reactionary and disempowering."

"Now in my 56th year of teaching university students, I have seen new technologies come and go, all of them hoping to "radicalize" my classroom, promising more efficient paths to greater academic achievement."

Read the rest of university professor Don Morgenson's column here.

Quote for the day: Critics can be their own worst critics

"I had grave doubts about my fitness to discuss the question of research in the humanities, because I have been deflected from everything that could conventionally be described as research, in the sense of reading material that other people have not read, or have read for a different purpose." ~~ Northrop Frye, "The Search for Acceptable Words," in Spiritus Mundi

Quote for the Day: Ignore the arts, or fear them?

"But educators for economic growth will do more than ignore the arts. They will fear them. For a cultivated and developed sympathy is a particularly dangerous enemy of obtuseness, and moral obtuseness is necessary to carry out programs of economic development that ignore inequality....aggressive nationalism needs to blunt the moral conscience, so it needs people who do not recognize the individual, who speak group-speak, who behave, and see the world, like docile bureaucrats." ~~ Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010)

Sunday reading

Life Under Compulsion: The Dehumanities, by Anthony Esolen at Front Porch Republic.  Part of a series mentioned at Suitable for Mixed Company.  

“Here is one,” says the father [of a new baby], “who will possess the capacity to embark upon independent research, who will present arguments that balance claim and counterclaim.”

“Here is one,” says the mother, “who will meet the Common Core Requirement anchor standards and high school grade-specific standards, which work in tandem to define college and career readiness expectations, the former providing broad standards, the latter providing additional specificity.”

I did not make that last sentence up.