Quote for the day: Not born free?

"When God Himself gave His ten commandments to the children of Israel, He did not impose an arbitrary rule. Drawing on the principle of propriety, He expressed ten laws that, if they followed them, would lead them to treat things as they ought to be treated (Worship the Lord, honor your parents, leave the neighbors stuff alone, etc.) and, since that is how reality is structured, they could be free. Not just free from Egypt, but free to be His people who knew them and what led to their flourishing." ~~ Andrew Kern, "Writing as a Liberating Art," Circe Institute blog

A lesson on Justice: Might or Right? (Lydia's Grade Eight)

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul quilt, in The Brooklyn Museum

Subject: Citizenship. Book studied: Whatever Happened to Justice?

Review: On page 126, "Uncle Eric" says, "The Founders did not like democracy and they did not trust it. They wanted liberty." Explain what he means by this.

On page 128, there is a short list of "obstacles to voting" in the early years of the United States: gender, skin colour, etc.  It turns out that less than three percent of the adult population were permitted to vote. Read the rest of the chapter and explain why 3%, at that time, was actually a novelty.

Chapter 23 is a short discussion of one question: if the Constitution was supposed to be the highest law of the land, where did Common Law now stand?

Read just the first page of Chapter 24. What is the meaning of the expression "robbing Peter to pay Paul?"  Why don't we want to do this? Why does "competing for privilege" mean that "everyone is scrambling for control of the blackjack?" Can you think of any fictional parallels?

At the bottom of page 134, "Uncle Eric" says that courts now seek to find ultimate law in the Constitution.  OK, then, he says; let's look at the language of the constitution. Your assignment: Read the rest of the chapter (one page and a bit) out loud, as if you were Uncle Eric (Aunt Erica) giving a speech.

School plans for the first of October: Befuddled? (Updated with monkeys.)

Some ideas for today's school with Lydia:

I'm trying to think of a way to work in the first audio installment of The Screwtape Letters, recorded by John Cleese in 1989, via a link at The Common Room today. Maybe it will be our school opener today--the first letter is about Screwtape's technique for basic distraction.  There's also a very important line in Letter #1, that might go by if you don't notice where Lewis snuck it in:  Screwtape jeers that "It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's [God's] clutches.  That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.  At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it.  They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning."

Screwtape insists that it's a demon's job not to teach but to "fuddle" us.  And that leads in...sort of...to part of a chapter of Daughter of Time.  Lots of fuddling there.

Lydia has the rest of the morning to figure out her own work:  math, AO readings, and so on.

Later we will read chapter 6 of Whatever Happened to Justice?, "Enforcement of Early Common Law." Mostly it's about restitution.  In the really early days (under common law), it was less common for someone to be imprisoned as punishment for a crime, because who wanted to pay taxes to support prisoners?  It was more common to pay fines and such to the victim, making restitution.

(What happened with that?  Well, I found this story about monkeys in a cage getting sprayed with ice water, in a book I am reading myself, and I thought it was a great introduction to chapter 7 of the book, about how custom is different from common law.  Why we do the things we do, and which of those things should be important enough to be laws.  So I just highlighted a couple of the main points from chapter 6 and said we'll get back to that when we talk more about force and policing.  I read the monkey story, and we focused on chapter 7 and then also read chapter 8 which is very short. What's homeschooling for if not to be flexible?)  (Monkey slide found here.)

And we'll work on French (Internet nouns and verbs, quite fun actually), and see if we can get into our review of Latin a bit (Mica, mica, parva stella).