Status Updates From Passing the Torch: An Apolo...

Summary of E. D. Hirsch
“Though skills are important, if children are not taught community-shared information, they will not be able to dialogue with people outside their group... Apart from this collective reservoir of symbols and meanings, we cannot communicate effectively through the written and even spoken word.”

Quote from Adler
“We need specialists for our economic prosperity, for our national welfare and security, for continued progress in all the arts and sciences, and in all fields of scholarship.
But for the sake of our cultural traditions, our democratic institutions, and our individual well-being, our specialists must also be generalists; that is, generally educated human beings.”

3 Reasons to teach history, not social studies:

“First, sociological-anthropological approaches… tend to press the volitional human element out of its study of the past. Second, they tend to brush over the facts of history… that students must learn if they are to understand the past at all. Third, they downplay… achievements of the West.”

[In] Polybius’s Histories… [he] shows how the political checks and balances instituted by Rome provided her with a strong but supple government structure…

I should have guessed our checks and balances came from the Romans! I don’t recall ever hearing this before.

4-yr history cycle
The first sweep through the classical, medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Victorian, and modern eras would emphasize key dates, places, figures, and conflicts (grammar school). The second would [add] biographies… focusing on their moral choices and motivations (middle school). The third would analyze the patterns of force… (high school).

“Only man believes propositions because they are true, performs actions because they are good, and creates works of art because they are beautiful. Indeed, only man has the rational capacity to determine that some things are true and others false, some good and others evil, some beautiful and others ugly. In his philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic judgments, he so soars above the animals…”

“I will define and celebrate man as a human person endowed with innate dignity and worth but fallen and in need of limits, rules, and discipline. I shall treat him as a rational, emotional, and volitional creature whose choices shape his feelings and determine his habits, and who must have his virtues cultivated, his affections trained, and his desires ordered.”

I should be farther along in this book. But after finishing the introduction I felt I must read it again.