I knew there was a reason we homeschooled them (something to read today)

Have you ever been part of or worked for an organization whose goals, you eventually realized, were the exact opposite of what you assumed they should be?

Found via the AmblesideOnline Facebook page (I'm not a Facebooker, but anybody can read their public page): "How a Generation Lost its Common Culture," by Patrick Deneen, at MindingTheCampus.org.

"During my lifetime, lamentation over student ignorance has been sounded by the likes of E.D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom, Mark Bauerlein and Jay Leno, among many others. But these lamentations have been leavened with the hope that appeal to our and their better angels might reverse the trend...Broadly missing is sufficient appreciation that this ignorance is the intended consequence of our educational system, a sign of its robust health and success...What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like 'critical thinking,' 'diversity,' 'ways of knowing,' 'social justice,' and 'cultural competence.'”

And then go and read Brandy's Afterthoughts post, "The Origin of Nature Knowledge in a Charlotte Mason Education."

"I remember a number of years ago when my oldest child was reading  Secrets of the Woods...This book made him long to spend extended time in the woods, and it enticed him into holding still and listening for movement, and then seeing what there was to see. It changed a boy that once romped wildly along the path into someone who tried to be quiet as a mouse. To this day, he behaves differently out on a trail because of that book."

That is why.