Journey To The Center Of

Fri, 30 September 2005

"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

Comments[0]