News from the Front Porch Republic (copy)
Greetings from the Porch,
Today is the opening day of trout season in PA--if you have a child under 16 fishing with you. In other words, the streams will be mobbed with ill-aimed hooks being cast toward schools of just-released hatchery-raised trout. Not the ideal situation, perhaps, but we'll be out nevertheless.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about baseball, O'Connor, and nostalgia.
- Adam Smith considers good and bad reasons for homeschooling: "Maybe this is the biggest difference between thinking like a homeschooler and thinking like a conventional schooler: it’s not about 'success.' If it’s about success, you need a program to get you there. You need 'learning outcomes.' And you need to eliminate all the surprises that might get in the way of achieving those 'outcomes' (you certainly can’t have kids wandering off into the woods to listen to Beethoven). Thinking like a homeschooler means thinking that real education happens in all those surprises, those serendipities, those things that can’t be put into a program and connected to an outcome."
- Reid Makowsky praises the old: "One question asked about my development as a professional—or, rather, about my Professional Development—during the last year. I dutifully described an online Old English course I’d been taking, outlining the many undoubted benefits in store for me and my students. Then I noticed a message below the box I was filling out. In red: 'Response contains offensive language: Old, Old, Old, Old, Old, Old.' I was amazed. Old? Offensive?"
- Jeremy Beer pens the review essay you need to read to celebrate the start of another baseball season: "As Kauffman tells Bardenwerper, perhaps being cut loose from MLB will turn out to be a blessing."
- Aaron Weinacht reviews Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction, by Steven Knepper, Ethan Stoneman, and Robert Wyllie, and considers two porchy themes in Han's work: "How to think about freedom, and his idiosyncratic concept of Friendliness."
- Peter Biles remembers a very special horse and the risks of cowardice: "I was never a real cowboy. Not even close. This was to become clear."
- Eric Malczewski draws on Thomas Hughes’s Victorian novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays and considers its lessons on friendship: "The novel’s major pedagogical insight is that pupils are always educated alongside particular individuals and in particular places and at particular times. Such insight can be grasped only loosely in a treatise focusing on abstract notions. Civil order is primarily immediate, local, and rooted in concrete historical experience."
This week we began reading my favorite Wendell Berry novel, Jayber Crow. It never gets old or fails to spark new insights as I re-read it. One of the discussions we had in class was how an educational institution might be a good neighbor to its place and community. Jayber has only negative experiences in this regard:
The university was in some ways the opposite of The Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd looked upon the outside world as a threat to its conventional wisdom. The university looked upon itself as a threat to the conventional wisdom of the outside world. According to it, it not only knew more than ordinary people but was more advanced and had a better idea of the world of the future.
Otherwise, the university and The Good Shepherd were a lot alike. That was another of my discoveries. It was a slow discovery and not one I enjoyed--I was a long time figuring it out. Every one of the educational institutions that I had been in had been hard at work trying to be a world unto itself. The Good Shepherd and Pigeonville College were trying to be the world of the past. The university was trying to be the world of the future, and maybe it has had a good deal to do with the world as it has turned out to be, but this has not been as big an improvement as the university expected. The university thought of itself as a place of freedom for thought and study and experimentation, and maybe it was, in a way. But it was an island too, a floating or a flying island. It was preparing people from the world of the past for the world of the future, and what was missing was the world of the present, where every body was living its small, short, surprising, miserable, wonderful, blessed, damaged, only life.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro