Journey To The Center Of

Mon, 28 November 2005

Welcome to any new friends that may have found us from the audio comment Adam Curry played on his Daily Source Code podcast today. The podfather spun an audio feedback that Brant recorded - check out his shownotes for all the links.

If you are new, or if you've been waiting for the next episode, fear not - the next show will probably be recorded this week. We had a wrap up of the ballot initiatives half recorded, but decided to scrap it as the issue is getting stale. We're tentatively planning a show on eminent domain for this week - stay tuned for more details and thanks for checking us out.

Category: general -- posted at: 7:57 PM

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Thu, 10 November 2005

OC Register

OC Register's the Gadgetress gave JTTCO a nod today on her blog:

The Gadgetress

Welcome to anyone who may have arrived from her site, and a big thank you to the Gadgetress for the link. We are currently planning on doing a followup to the ballot propositions, so subscribe to our RSS feed and we'll get you a new show as soon as we can.

Category: general -- posted at: 11:20 PM

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Mon, 7 November 2005

Notice

To all our listeners who are patiently awaiting the second installment on the ballot props - this weekend was a little crazy for the JTTCO team, with a mix of both technical difficulties and life crowding out podcasting. We will hopefully get the last installment up tonight, just in time for you to listen to on your way into the polls tomorrow morning. Thanks for your patience.

In the meantime, Brant has blogged his position on all of the ballot propositions at his blog - Sarcasmagorical.com. And Steve, well... he was voting no on just about everything anyway.

Category: general -- posted at: 7:10 AM

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Sat, 8 October 2005

Quotes on Education

As I was preparing for our last JTTCO podcast - Journey To The Center Of Education - I searched out some good quotes from C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. Not wanting them to go to waste - since I didn't have a chance to read many in the podcast, and because I partially promised them in the cast - here they are:

G.K. Chesterton:
"It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching."

"We cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom. Education is only truth in a state of transmission; and how can we pass on truth if it has never come into our hand?"

Speaking about the idea that education is "leading out", that educators draw out the innate knowledge in children (he also makes fun of this by saying they are leading out the child's innate love of long division and such) -
"I think it would be about as sane to say that the baby's milk comes from the baby as to say that the baby's educational merits do. There is, indeed, in each living creature a collection of forces and functions; but education means producing these in particular shapes and training them to particular purposes, or it means nothing at all. Speaking is the most practical instance of the whole situation. You may indeed "draw out" squeals and grunts from the child by simply poking him and pulling him about, a pleasant but cruel pastime to which many psychologists are addicted. But you will wait and watch very patiently indeed before you draw the English language out of him. That you have got to put into him; and there is an end of the matter."

"What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves. "

"The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense. "

C.S. Lewis:
"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil."

"You see at once that education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves... If education is beaten by training, civilization dies. That is a thing very likely to happen."

"One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world."

"The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it out while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come."

The demon Screwtape, advising other demons -
"The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.'... Children, who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma...by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I'm as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows?"

For these last few quotes, I'm greatly indebted to The Quotable C.S. Lewis. It's a great reference work and filled with Lewis' wisdom.

Category: general -- posted at: 1:28 AM

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Fri, 30 September 2005

Our Inaugural post

"Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisment and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined? ...do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible? Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side?" - Dorothy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning

I came across these sagacious words while doing the prep for our very first podcast of Journey to the Center Of, and found them rather fitting for what our goal is with this podcast. Steve and I have worked together for a while and had many a conversation over lunch. While Steve leans to the left and I lean to the right, it surprises us how many different subjects we agree on - and usually for different reasons. In our culture, most of our debate (especially here online) centers primarily on politics. This fact alone is telling, as politics is not nearly the most interesting subject in which we can engage each other, and in fact most of our lunch discussions are directed toward other subjects even though they might still be broadly termed as right-left in nature. It might be said that our obsession with politics reveals a postmodernist bent in our culture; having discarded the idea of truth, the only interesting subject becomes power, which is really the foundation of political discussion. But even in the subject of politics, the idea struck us that there is a remnant of people who feel estranged from the two political parties and political "debate", which generally consists of each side throwing the same tired old arguments at the other, with far more interest in simply winning the political power over finding the truth.

The Bible teaches, "Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another." (Proverbs 27:17) Aristotle taught that virtue lies on a mean between the vice of excess and the vice of deficiency. Somewhere in between two extremes is where the truth will be found, and it is our endeavor to Journey To The Center Of - to examine disparate subjects in detail, to find where we agree and disagree, and to sharpen one another's understanding as we attempt to find the truth.

Our first show will be Journey To The Center Of Education, and we'll be looking at a number of different things about education - public schooling, modern vs. classical, homeschooling, etc. It should be obvious now why I was reading Dorothy Sayers' essay in prep for the show. We plan on recording it Sunday, but it might not make it up on the site until we've done a little editing. We welcome any suggestions on topics, and we plan on doing a Journey To The Center Of Journey To The Center Of (or JTTCO Squared, if you prefer) where we will discuss the format itself - but we wanted to get a few shows under our belt and find our format first. If you have any thoughts/comments on the show, feel free to comment this post or send us email at journeytothecenterof@gmail.com.

Category: general -- posted at: 10:52 AM

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