DISCUSS: Talking Sports

September 16, 2022 By Gene Veith

College and NFL football have started up again! Baseball is headed to the wire and to the playoffs! And there are lots of controversies, proposed changes, and dramas to talk about! So this weekend let’s talk sports.

The college season looks to be interesting. Last weekend three of the top 10 teams were defeated. Mighty Notre Dame, ranked #8, was defeated by Marshall, best known for losing most of their football team in a tragic airplane crash in 1970, the subject of the 2006 movie We Are Marshall. Texas A&M (enrollment 73,000), ranked #6, was beaten by Appalachian State (enrollment 18,000).

This to me shows the wisdom of the planned 12-team playoff, which will give teams from unheralded conferences, such as the Sun Belt conference where both Marshall and Appalachian State, a shot at the national championship.

Also last weekend, Alabama, ranked #1 as they nearly always are, came within 10 seconds of losing to unranked Texas. Which tells me that the Texas Longhorns and the Oklahoma Sooners may do well in the SEC when they switch over there in the near future.

Start whatever threads you want to discuss–including predictions, criticisms, and laments–but I’m curious what you think about Major League Baseball’s plan to change the rules next year by imposing a pitch timer (no more than 15 seconds between pitches,20 with a runner on base) and to outlaw infield shifts (the strategy of shifting defenders to one side for batters that always hit in that direction).

I abominate that! The whole point of baseball is that there is no clock, no time pressure, which is what makes it so relaxing. And taking away a defensive strategy–which sometimes doesn’t work and is thus a big risk, adding suspense to the game–in order to generate more offense? What’s sporting about that? As for all of these efforts to speed up the game, I’m against them all. When I go to a game, I want to get my money’s worth, so I want it to last as long as possible.

Your turn. . .

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Teacher Education Programs Don’t Teach How to Teach

September 2, 2022 By Gene Veith

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In order to get a teaching certificate, would-be teachers in the public or most private systems must take a series of required courses from the Department of Education in their colleges or universities. Those courses, in turn, are, for the most part, prescribed by the state Department of Public Instruction.

Daniel Buck tells of his experience with Departments of Education while pursuing a Master’s Degree in that subject at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He then tells about a study of teacher-training programs in all of the public universities of the Badger state.

He found that all of the 14 teacher training programs in the state require courses in race theory, gender studies, LGBTQ issues, and Marxist-infused “critical pedagogy.” There are also what he calls “kitschy activities” such as watching movies, making expressive arts and crafts, and sharing personal feelings. But there are hardly any courses in how to teach.

His article, Education Schools Have Long Been Mediocre. Now They’re Woke Too, is published in the Wall Street Journal, which is behind a paywall, but here is the opening:

I studied for a master’s degree in education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. My program was batty. We made Black Lives Matter friendship bracelets. We passed around a popsicle stick to designate whose turn it was to talk while professors compelled us to discuss our life’s traumas. We read poems through the “lenses” of Marxism and critical race theory in preparation for our students doing the same. Our final projects were acrostic poems or ironic rap videos.

At the time, I figured my experience was unique. Surely, I thought, other teacher-prep programs focused on human cognition, behavioral management, child psychology and other educational practicalities. Alas, my program was mild compared with what current graduates must suffer.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has reviewed the required coursework for 14 programs for teachers-to-be in the Badger State. These programs produce about 80% of all teaching graduates in the state each year. What they found was shocking. Worldview building and ideological manipulation take precedence over teacher preparation.

On the syllabi, noticeably lacking are academic literature or manuals of classroom instruction. Instead, Hollywood movies like “Freedom Writers,” popular books like Jonathan Kozol’s “Letters to a Young Teacher,” and propaganda like “Anti-Racist Baby” abound. In place of academic essays, graduate students write personal poems or collect photographs. These kitschy activities infantilize what ought to be a rigorous pursuit of professional competency.

Buck cites another study that found that only 22% of schools of education teach the “science of reading”–that is, teaching reading by phonics, as we blogged about.

The report he references, a study of the syllabi of all required education in the state’s public universities, is entitled From the Top: The Impact of College-Level Indoctrination on K-12 Education. These turn out 80% of the state’s teachers. Who, apparently, are getting little help in preparing for what they are going to have to do in actual classrooms. Some figure it out for themselves and perform well. But nearly 10% quit after only one year, and nearly 50% quit within five years.

Comments Buck,

Students are the obvious losers. But teachers suffer, too. It’s almost a rite of passage that every teacher must go through hell his first year. Partly this is a function of getting used to the job, but it’s also a reflection of how ill-prepared they are by their training to stand in front of a classroom full of students.

To be sure, there are lots of good teachers out there, despite how they may have been trained, teachers who do not indoctrinate or corrupt their students, but rather teach them the knowledge and skills that they need to know. They deserve our honor and support. I have come to appreciate greatly the teachers I have come to know in our classical schools. And some colleges and universities–I think of Hillsdale, Patrick Henry College, and other Christian colleges–have teacher training programs that do what they are supposed to do. But there is a reason why we have a crisis in education today, and it starts in the universities.

HT: Jackie Veith

Photo via pxhere, CC0, public domain

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The Significance of the Fireplace

August 18, 2022 By Gene Veith

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We learned that our chimney needs repairs before we can use our fireplace this winter, forcing us to consider whether or not we really need one. Whereupon I came across this essay by Paul Kingsnorth, the radical environmentalist novelist turned Orthodox Christian and culture critic, whom we have blogged about.

He and his family currently pursue a simple lifestyle in rural Ireland. He complains that the Irish government has launched a crusade against fireplaces, on the grounds that burning wood puts too much carbon into the air and thus contributes to global warming (never mind that automobiles, industries, and even the infrastructure for the internet contribute far more).

This leads him to making the point that the Latin word for fireplace–or hearth–is “focus,” which is where we get our English word “focus.” The point is that the fireplace–or hearth– was the “focus” of the home. Our ancestors sat around the fireplace, looking into the fire. The hearth provided warmth and thus protection from the cold outside. It also provided food, which was cooked on the fire. While focusing on the fire, families would also converse, tell stories, and sing. We still get a trace of that when we go camping and sit around the fire, singing “campfire songs” and telling ghost stories. It also gave light in the darkness.

Today, Kingsnorth argues, our homes lack “focus.” So do most people. We lack a “center.” Here is what he says about it, from his essay The West Is Homeless:

In his short essay “Fireside Wisdom”, the uncategorisable John Michell suggested that the “displacement of the hearth or fireplace” from the home was one of the many reasons for the craziness of the modern world which his life had been spent playfully exploring. The fireplace at the centre of the home, he wrote, was both an ancient practicality and a device of “cosmological significance” across cultures and time: “Conversation is directed into the fire while dreams and images are drawn out of it.”

In the past, the act of sitting staring into the smoky fire with family or neighbours was the genesis of the folk tale and folk song which tied the culture together. Now we stare at digital fires hemmed into boxes manufactured by distant corporations who also tell us our stories. No song we can dream up around a real fireplace can compete with what these boxed fires can sell us. “Thus,” wrote Michell, “the traditional cosmology is no longer represented by its domestic symbols, and a new, secular, restless, uncentred world-view has taken its place.”

Focus, Michell explained, is “the Latin name for the central fireplace. The fire not only warms but, as a symbol, illuminates the corresponding images of a centre to each of our own beings and of a world-centre which is divine, eternal and unchanging.” Lose your fires, and you literally lose your focus as a culture. In this context, a government spokesman telling his population, as one minister here recently did, that they should “get over” their “nostalgic” attachment to the hearth fire and install ground source heat pumps instead is more than just a nod to efficiency. It is an assault on what remains of the home and its meaning. It is an attack on the cultural — even the divine — centre.

Today, of course, our living rooms do have a “focus,” which all of the chairs are turned to and which everyone stares at: the video screen. Then again, in many families, each member has his or her own screen, a TV in everyone’s bedroom or a personal computer screen on everyone’s lap. Thus, they have their own personal “focus.” Though sometimes families still gather around the communal flat screen TV in the living room for sporting events, movies, or other communal programming. That can still be valuable, but it isn’t the same as the ancient “focus.”

What will be the difference between the focus being the fire that gives warmth and nourishment to the family and the electronic screen? I like the way Kingsnorth describes them, as fire boxes of a different kind: “digital fires hemmed into boxes manufactured by distant corporations who also tell us our stories.”

To be sure, the “hearth” is technologically obsolete. We have all-electric kitchens to cook our food, central heating to keep us warm, electric lights to banish the darkness, video screens to tell us stories and let us watch other people singing, and computer screens to convey what information and wisdom we have.

Conversely, you don’t have to have a fireplace to “center” your home and your life, not if you have God. And, no, Kingsnorth’s essay wasn’t a factor in our decision to fix our chimney.

But he goes on to make an even bigger point, about the disintegration not just of the family but of the “home.” We’ll get into that topic tomorrow.

Image by s-wloczyk2 from Pixabay

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My Christmas Presents to You

December 24, 2021 By Gene Veith

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Readers, in gratitude for your coming to this blog over the past year, I’d like to give you some Christmas gifts. I did much of my shopping online, and these particular gifts will stay online, little things I’ve found that you might enjoy and find edifying.

First, here is my Christmas card. It’s a contemporary painting of Mary showing her Baby to the shepherds and wise men, a different take on the subject filled with joy and great expressions. The painting, entitled “Nativity” by Carol Aust, is accompanied by a discussion of the work by Laurel Gasque, who not only unpacks the painting but meditates on what it means.

(1) Coming across that work introduced me to the first present I want to give you. The site that the “Nativity” is on is called ArtWay. It’s run by some Dutch Christians associated with the late evangelical art critic Hans Rookmaaker. The scope of the site, though, is international and ecumenical, but, from what I can tell, orthodox. My gift, should you decide to accept it, is this: Every Sunday ArtWay will send you a free Visual Meditation much like the “Nativity” painting and its commentary, featuring the work of a Christian artist old or new. To sign up for this gift that will keep on giving throughout the year, click here.

(2) Also, I don’t know if you like to receive presents from your friends’ children to put up on your refrigerator but this is of a different order entirely. My daughter Mary Moerbe has a website called Meet, Write, and Salutary (get it?), which features Lutheran writers–conversations by and about them, lists of writers you may want to follow, and reviews of their books. She gives away a ton of free resources. She also has another website that some of you will find very helpful, Lutheran Homeschool Marketplace & Press, which also offers lots of resources for you homeschooling families, many of which are free and others of which are worth the price.

(3) A gift of a different kind is a movie: The Shootist. This was John Wayne’s last movie, made in 1976 when the Duke was 69 and in bad health, three years before he died. And it features a constellation of other megastars near their end–Lauren Bacall and Jimmy Stewart–as well as lesser-but-still-wonderful lights like Richard Boone, Hugh O’Brian, Harry Morgan, and John Carradine. And one up-and-comer, the young Ron Howard.

John Wayne plays an old gunfighter who is dying of cancer. We witness the country doctor, played by Stewart, breaking the news and see how the hero takes it. (Wayne would say that he had already had that conversation with his doctor in real life.) He checks into a boarding house, run by Bacall, for his last days. The problem is, other younger gunfighters want to fight him to put a prestigious notch on their guns. And the landlady’s son, played by Howard, wants to grow up to be a killer like him. Meanwhile, the John Wayne character is taking stock of his violent life and his imminent death.

I am in awe of this movie. The actors may be at the end of their careers, but they are at the top of their craft and their performances are stunning. And young Howard, between Opie and Richie Cunningham and long before his directing career, won himself a Golden Globe nomination for this part, which turns into far more than we expect. And despite the theme of aging, death, and farewell to the genre of the Western, the story, far from depressing, is gripping and exciting, with a brilliant double-twist at the end.

When we watched this a few months ago, it was streaming on a free channel via Amazon Prime, but I see that’s it not available now. The companies must have realized what they had. Now it’s free if you have Hulu, but you can rent it for $2.99. So I guess what I’m giving you is not a movie, as I wanted, but a suggestion for a movie.

(4) Social Media and search engines are having trouble distinguishing between a satirical story and actual news–I got an Onion story on my Google News feed a few days ago–but that’s OK because sometimes I can’t either, so absurd our times have become. At any rate, I give you the Gift of Satire: Lutheran Satire, Babylon Bee, The Onion.

(5) This is one you probably already have, but that’s traditional in Christmas gift giving too. But, if not, you should read, mark, and inwardly digest it : Bible Gateway. It has some 200 translations of the Bible in 70 languages, including the original Greek and Hebrew. You can easily search it by word, verse, chapter, topic, or just about any way you like. You can also compare how different translations render a text. And you can copy and paste passages, making this an ideal resource for pastors, teachers, writers, or other students of the Bible, as we all should be.

Finally, you can also have the presents I gave you in 2019, which are still available. Feel free to regift.

So have a happy Night Before Christmas and a joyous celebration of our Savior’s birth! He is the gift that all of our other gifts symbolize!

Image by anaterate via Pixabay

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The Mystery of Tom Bombadil

October 14, 2021 By Gene Veith

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One of the puzzles in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings sagas is who–or what–is Tom Bombadil?

The jovial forest-dweller is a “merry fellow” who lives in a homey, cozy cabin similar to that of hobbits, but he has immense power. He makes short work of barrow-wrights and Old Man Willow, and, mysteriously, the Ring of Power has no power over him. Instead of hiding it as he usually does, Frodo feels like giving it to him. And when he slips it on, he doesn’t disappear!

Who is this guy? He isn’t an elf or a dwarf or a human or a hobbit or a wizard. He is too earthy to be an Ainur or a Valar or one of the other spiritual beings in the Silmarillion.

Tolkien wrote a poem about him, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, but he doesn’t discuss him in the Silmarillion. Peter Jackson didn’t so much as include him in his movie versions of Tolkien’s tales.

My wife Jackie once went to a conference where she met Christopher Tolkien, the son of the great fantasy author who edited and published many of his father’s manuscripts. She asked him where Tom Bombadil fit into the Middle Earth universe. The younger Tolkien said that this is an excellent question, but that he didn’t really know. UPDATE: My wife informs that I got this wrong. She did meet Christopher Tolkien, but didn’t ask him this. She asked Clyde Kilby, who worked with both Tolkien and Lewis, and got this answer.

Some critics, picking up on a hint from Tolkien, said that he was some kind of spirit of a place. But that hardly explains his power. Some critics pick up on his wife Goldberry’s answer when Frodo asked her about him: “He is.” That sounds like how God identifies Himself to Moses–“I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14)– so they maintain that Tom represents God. But Tolkien dismissed that interpretation. After all, Tom is described as being basically indifferent to the intrigues of Middle Earth, and at the Council of Elrond when someone solving the problem of the Ring by giving it to Bombadil, Gandalf says that he would be so uninterested in the thing that he would probably just misplace it. That’s not how God would be.

But I just came across a post from a fan at GameRant that offers the best explanation that I have come across. From Melissa C., Who Is Tom Bombadil And What Is His Significance In LOTR?:

Tom Bombadil’s exact age is not known, but it is said he existed since sometime before the first Dark Lord (Melkor) rose to power. His exact race is not known, and he remains mysterious—although with some apparent magical and spiritual abilities. Tom Bombadil lived with his wife, Goldberry, just east of the Shire in the Old Forest. He has a few titles, like The First and Eldest. In the book, Tom even states that he “was here before the river and the trees” and he “remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn,” suggesting he may have been the very first creature to live in Middle Earth (along with Treebeard, though Tom was first). Being so old and in seemingly good health, Tom Bombadil is an enigma. In addition to being the first living creature to exist in Middle Earth, Tom may also be the first creature in all of Arda—or the world. . . .

Each race gave Tom Bombadil a different name, but the name given by the Elves—Iarwain Ben-adar, which meant Oldest and Fatherless in Elven—says a lot.

So Tom Bombadil would be the equivalent of Adam! Not the father of all living, since, unlike our world, Middle Earth has many kinds of intelligent beings. Imagine what an unfallen Adam would be like! If he hadn’t sinned, he would not die. His dominion over the natural order would be complete. As age after age passed away for him, he would be unlikely to care too much about the transitory affairs of the rest of us.

His literary creator did say one more thing about him that is important: “Even in a mythical Age,” he wrote in a letter, “there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally)”.

In his imaginary sub-creation, Tolkien does not make everything cut and dry, creating a closed rational system. Rather, he stimulates our imagination by deliberately building in enigmas–mysteries–which add to our sense of wonder.

And so it is in our real world.

Image from Amazon.com

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Black Americans Discover Classical Education (part I)

September 27, 2021 By Gene Veith

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Black Americans are the biggest casualties of today’s progressive education establishment. And it’s getting worse.

Progressive educators are now jettisoning honors programs, academic standards, and reading and math requirements, all of which are being said to promote “white supremacy.” As if black kids can’t be good students, can’t get good grades, can’t learn to read, and can’t do math.

It has gotten to the point that, as we blogged about (see this and this), new mathematics programs are saying that the goal of “getting the right answer” is white supremacist. Tell that to the black women featured in the true-life movie Hidden Figures who did the calculations for NASA in those pre-computer days that made the Mercury space program possible.

Many black parents are correctly recognizing these low expectations on the part of mostly white liberal educational theorists to be racist. They want their children to get a good education, but the public schools, having failed to provide it, are now saying that doing so is impossible. Black parents want an alternative. And they are finding it in classical education.

After all, classical education is built around the “liberal arts,” a term that refers not to a political position but to the Latin word for “freedom,” the same root that gives us “liberty” and “liberating.” This approach to education goes back to the ancient world and its two different educational paths: “servile” education, consisting solely of occupational training, was provided for slaves. But free citizens of the Greek democracies and the Roman republic were given a “liberal” education designed to equip them for freedom, political participation, leadership, civic virtues, logical analysis, effective communication, and creativity.

That distinction is why the radical early Black leader W. E. B. Du Bois opposed plans to give the freed slaves merely occupational training. He insisted that they needed liberal education, as provided by classical schools and colleges. They needed an education that would be liberating.

I came across two articles on how black Americans are rediscovering the relevance for them of classical education and are taking advantage of the new classical schools and homeschools.

In fact, even some white liberals are rediscovering classical education. The left-leaning Catholic magazine America has published an excellent article by Jeremy Tate entitled In Defense of a Classical Education. Read it all, but here is a sample:

For many, the mention of classical education evokes images of elitist New England boarding schools where for decades all-white graduating classes would matriculate to the Ivy League and go from there to control the levers of political and economic power. This image—classical education as a fine veneer to cover racial snobbery and entrenched power—has frequently dampened people’s enthusiasm for a 21st-century revival in classical education, or even provoked opposition to it.

But there is another story to tell. Visitors to Frederick Douglass’s home in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C. discover a bust of Cicero in the parlor, and his autobiography includes a treatise on the influence of ancient philosophers. W. E. B. Du Bois casually drops allusions to Greek mythology and passages of medieval poetry into his discussion of the failures of Reconstruction. Anna Julia Cooper constructs her argument for Black women’s education with examples drawn from the history of classical Athens and the feminine luminaries of the Renaissance.

What is it that these bold activists saw in this tradition of culture and education to lay hold of? Were they wrong? I don’t believe they were.

It would be foolish to pretend that classical education has never been a pretext for arrogance and hypocrisy. But abandoning the tradition would still be a bad choice, even if there were nothing more to say about classical education than that. It is not just a coincidence that so many civil rights activists have had a classical background. This kind of education opens us up to the riches of our civilization, and inspires people to see both the higher values (including virtues like prudence and temperance) and possibilities of the world, and devote themselves to the hard, creative work of realizing those possibilities.

The elite boarding schools of both the United States and the United Kingdom, favored by those who could afford the very best education for their children that money could buy, employed a classical curriculum. If that is “elitist,” the solution is not to do away with it, but to extend this “elite” education to everybody else, to ordinary Americans of all races, economic levels, and walks of life.

The article goes on to show the impact of classical education on black activists and the civil rights movement, with in depth attention to Martin Luther King, Jr. I love this paragraph:

To dismiss classic literature as “dead white guys” does a great disservice not only to the books themselves (many of whose authors, like Dr. King or St. Augustine or Mary Shelley, were not white or guys), but to young people we are trying to educate. Everyone has a right to this material. The novelist Saul Bellow once asked “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” The journalist Ralph Wiley replied, “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” Tolstoy is not the exclusive property of Russia: He is, in the old sense of the word, catholic.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.” He belongs to all humanity, and he expresses a reality that all human beings–despite any differences of culture, time, or race–can share and learn from.

In fact, the truth that we are all members of a common humanity is exactly what we need to recover in order to combat racism and national polarization.

Classical education conveys that truth, as opposed to the contrary ideologies that teach that racial division is inevitable and that all of our diverse groups, instead of enhancing our humanity, are simply trying to oppress each other.

Next time: Black parents and their children who have gone classical.

Photo: W. E. B. Du Bois by Cornelius Marion Battey – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs divisionunder the digital ID cph.3a53178. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1657440

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