Most Vile Murder by School

The government school system has become an organised crime racket. So much money changes hands that quasi-criminal vested interests have achieved control of the established mechanism. Just like an organised crime syndicate, it will take a great deal of effort, perhaps violent effort, to dismantle the abbatoir, the gas rooms, the areas of mass execution.

The remarkable scholar Dorothy Sayers had much to say about the absurdity of the school system, several decades ago. Sine then things have become immeasurably worse.

When we think about the remarkably early age at which the young men went up to university in, let us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were held fit to assume responsibility for the conduct of their own affairs, are we altogether comfortable about that artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day? To postpone the acceptance of responsibility to a late date brings with it a number of psychological complications which, while they may interest the psychiatrist, are scarcely beneficial either to the individual or to society.

We shut children away in isolation chambers, confined with many others of the same age and state of ignorance, expose them to an indoctrination into political correctness and unimaginative drivel for several years--keeping them from as much responsibility and real personal challenge as possible--and somehow expect them to grow into capable and responsible adults. This is an absurdity and a crime.

Please go to Ms. Sayer's essay linked above, and read it thoughtfully. Remember it was written several decades ago, before the political correctness police and postmodern idiocy took hold of teacher's training colleges. Now things are much worse.

Here's an excerpt from This and That blog, discussing the above essay and one other that bears on the same topic. I have shamelessly copied from This and That, out of pure laziness on my part.

Ms. Sayers is best known as the author of the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels (you should read them, they’re awesome). She was an accomplished scholar of languages, and among the first recipients when Sommerville College at Oxford began granting degrees to women. At Oxford she was one of the cool kids in the clique with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Mr. Whitehead was best known as a mathematician and physicist. He coauthored the gigantic Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russel at the turn of the 20th century. That three volume set attempted to define the foundations of mathematics from the ground up. Years later his theories on gravity were the main competition to Einstein’s general relativity. Mr. Whitehead’s theories held merit until 1972 when they were finally discredited by experimentation.

Both of them were taught with the trivium method and both believed that England was being damaged by the abandonment of that technique in its schools.

The Lost Tools of Learning
by Dorothy L. Sayers

When she first presented this in 1947 she was already warning us of the dangers we would face if we grew up in a world full of advertisements, bombarded with claims of every sort. How would we know how to separate the truths from the fallacies when schools no longer taught logic? You don’t have to stretch your mind very far to understand how many thousands of times more important that message is given our information-overloaded society.

I also particularly like her argument for having students learning Latin or Greek (or other highly inflected language) at an early age. The reasoning being that by learning the formal mechanics of language first, the rules of proper grammar in our modern non-inflected languages can be more easily understood. It sounds better the way she presents it.

The Place of Classics in Education
by Alfred North Whitehead

Mr. Whitehead presented this essay in 1929 in his bookThe Aims of Education and Other Essays . One paragraph begins:

The function of Latin literature is its expression of Rome.

He goes on to say that you need to understand Rome if you are going to understand Western culture (which he defined as England and France). Rome was the pinnacle of Mediterranean civilization and shaped everything we know today.

There’s a great bit in there on why he believed it was important to read the Classical works in the original Latin rather than in translation. I’ll leave it to you to find out his reasons.

But then that might be expecting too much, since it is rare to find a government school teacher capable of reading Latin, much less capable of teaching Latin.