Thanks proxy_user.
Posted on 09/11/2018 7:24:31 PM PDT by proxy_user
SANTA FE, N.M. — Have I got a college for you. For your first two years, your regimen includes ancient Greek. And I do mean Greek, the language, not Greece, the civilization, though you’ll also hang with Aristotle, Aeschylus, Thucydides and the rest of the gang. There’s no choice in the matter. There’s little choice, period.
Let your collegiate peers elsewhere design their own majors and frolic with Kerouac. For you it’s Kant. You have no major, only “the program,” an exploration of the Western canon that was implemented in 1937 and has barely changed.
It’s intense. Learning astronomy and math, you don’t merely encounter Copernicus’s conclusions. You pore over his actual words. You’re not simply introduced to the theory of relativity. You read “Relativity,” the book that Albert Einstein wrote.
Diversions are limited. There’s no swimming team. No pool. The dorms are functional; same goes for the dining. You’re not here for banh mi. You’re here for Baudelaire.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I have a friend who taught in Santa Fe. He is a font of knowledge.
There is a whole movement to discredit the Wright Brothers by giving other flight pioneers more credit and the Wright’s less credit. But the Wrights had it right approaching the problems of controlling the pitch, roll, and yaw of an aircraft with remarkable minds and systematic work and improvements. Those guys deserve a mountain of credit for what they pulled off at the end of 1903.
In a different way I believe, a classical liberal education such as at St. Johns is every bit a brain twister as a STEM pathway. STEM focuses on some combination of 1) rote memorization of mass amounts detail then recalling later to recombine into new or novel ways or 2) works within the laws and techniques of mathematics to some end. To some large degree, I describe this as learning what to think.
From a different direction, I believe the classical education teaches how to think. See how this is different? What to think versus how to think. It took me 20 odd years of professional STEM experience albet with a non-traditional breadth of exposures to many situations to expand to how to think.
A cousin of mine went to a Catholic private 1-12 school in Santa Fe that IIRC was affiliated with St. Johns (1960s). Many or most of the teachers were Monks, not sure of what order. One thing he mentioned that stuck with me is that the Monks were very strict on discipline and were not shy on the use of corporal punishment for going outside the lines of proper behavior.
"accept" not "except" ...unless you wanted an anagram, and meant "expect". I'll be charitable and blame autocorrect and its fellow evil twin, spellchecker.
In the state of our present American culture, it is in no way the current leftist's dream. This is not your grandfathers "left", it is a parody of it, a plastic copy by a very sick society.
I was smiling the entire time I was reading the description of the college. It reminded me of the high School I attended. We were not a perfect match, I was a mediocre student; a lazy student, worked just hard enough to get mostly Bs, and a few As and Cs.
But what a Lineup!
No electives.
4 years of Latin.
Two Years of Greek.
One semester of physics.
One Semester of Chemistry.
Religion/ethics
Algebra
Plane Geometry.
Trigonometry.
Solid Geometry.
Today's High School is the lower school of the late 40s.
Today's college is the high school of the early 50s.
College was another great adventure too; but that's another story.
This is what university will return to after the massive debt-fed education-industrial-political complex finally deflates.
Hutchins made the news quite often from his perch in his think tank in Santa Barbara, populated with leftists who were intent on exposing conservatives as neo-fascists. Goldwater and Reagan were two of their favorite targets in op-eds dutifully published by editors of like mind such as Tom Braden of the Oceanside Blade-Tribune. (Braden, an ex-CIA operative who was for a time Pat Buchanan's sparring partner on CNN's Firing Line program, was the prototypical liberal newspaper publisher who would echo whatever tripe was put out by leftist think tanks.)
Not saying that studying the classics is another step closer to the totalitarian abyss, but I'm curious as to why there appears to be so much interest among those on the academic left.
Certain founders of this great nation read Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas and European history (some in the original Latin and Greek) and were for the most part defenders of man's natural rights and wary of an all-powerful central government. Until recently, it was normal for Republican candidates for office to occasionally refer in their campaigns to the signers of the Declaration of Independence and/or the Constitution as models they wished to follow in their political careers.
So where do current candidates go these days to get this kind of education? St. John's? Or are there more that offer this kind of study?
Thank you for your charity.
Thanks proxy_user.
...writing code for Google that shadow bans conservative media
...or developing military hardware for wars we should never get involved in
...or developing technology that can be gamed by Democrats to steal elections.
Engineers and scientists could be productive members of a good society, but they can also become pawns in an evil one. Which is what our American society seems to be degenerating into now that the liberals have gained control of ALL of the major areas of our society ... including Wall Street.
A very good heritage indeed.
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?
What the hell is banh mi?
I sure hope you’re right. One of my kids just graduated from a STEM only university. Total geek school.
It was very small, just a few hundred students. No dorm. They had apartments. No cafeteria. Want to eat? Cook it yourself.
No sports teams.
Most important- No fluff classes and very little pc nonsense.
Nearly every class pertained to his major.
They also guarantee that grads will find a job in their field writhin 90 days.
In reality, most are working in their field well before they graduate.
In his case, as an Astronautical Engineering major, he had a 30 hour a week job at NASA as a data technician for a satellite mission.
Soon after graduation, another NASA contractor hired him for a systems engineering gig on an array of satellites.
My oldest daughter has decided to complete her bachelors. She found an online college “broker” called Unbound.
They took her existing credits and created a bachelors program for her consisting of online classes from multiple colleges.
It’s cheap and she’s really enjoying it. She took a full time nanny job for an infant so she can study during nap time.
These two types of programs both seem far better than the institutionalized warehouse football team with a college attached.
Why is quitting a pseudonym for bailing-out of an airplane? You only "bail" from an emergency. It's not voluntary.
Bookmarked.
It is up to the individual not to become a pawn of anyone.
Most Engineering Students and Practicing Engineers like myself from 1970 - 2017 work to build a better life for themselves and their community. If we can't do that without becoming pawns of sinister forces in the United States of America, where can we go?
We need a critical mass of conservatives going into the liberal arts, journalism, the media, arts, corporate business, law, and politics.
No number of conservative engineers is going to stem the tide of liberal idiocy that is metastasizing in the West.
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