Matt Ely > Recent Status Updates

"Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettantism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference." (447)

“Mere massiveness, muchness, manyness, becomes a determinant of learning; yet it appears easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than that all that ‘information’ should go over into the realm of wisdom.”

"People too young to know themselves and too uneducated to learn easily are encouraged to acquire specific skills for immediate economic reasons. This... is not peculiar to the American education, except for the irony of it. For whereas in planned economies, such sacrifices are enforced in the name of social productiveness, here they are urged for private profit."

"O, were mine eye-balls into bullets turn'd,
That I in rage might shoot them at your faces!"

"The art of teaching consists in large part of interesting people in things that ought to interest them, but do not."

Why isn't this the motto of every Ed program?

"We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object of propaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangers to democracy. A prevalent notion is that the great mass of people cannot be educated... but they can be bamboozled."

These Perennialists go hard from page one, man.

"If we affirm a principle that is supposed to be self-evident, without its being evident to us, or a conclusion that is supposed to be demonstrated, without being able to demonstrate it... we have acquired an opinion, not knowledge; and if we persist in it through a sort of verbal memory, rather than a truly intellectual penetration of truth, we have been indoctrinated, not instructed."

"We cannot educate the young; the best we can do for them is to school them in such a way that they have a good chance to become educated in the course of their adult life."

"Failing to develop critical minds... contemporary education makes the way easy for demagogues of all sorts... For whenever reason does not rule, the mind must yield to the sheer weight of opinion propagated by pressure; only might remains and none dares say it is not right."

This dude is speaking my language. The quote in from 1941 but it's no less true today.

"Novelty by itself does not stir us; it must be proclaimed as dispensing us from former allegiances. We are not content to say 'This too is true"; we must revolutionize thought by saying "Nothing but this is true.'"

This dude is speaking my language. The quote in from 1941 but it's no less true today.

"Novelty by itself does not stir us; it must be proclaimed as dispensing us from former allegiances. We are not content to say 'This too is true"; we must revolutionize thought by saying "Nothing but this is true.'"

Lots of zingers, lots of sadness

This book is also about cricket (though it has decidedly more Marxism than Cricket for Dummies)

I've never read a "for dummies" book, but it accurately described my knowledge of cricket, so I went with it.

'Tis the Season to put traditional religious narratives under historical and literary scrutiny, deconstructing them but hopefully discovering new depths in the process

I am now reading a book about books about baseball. All I can say for sure is that my "to-read" and "baseball" shelves are soon to explode in an overwhelming and deeply unsustainable way.

Plane 8, here I come, y'all