Lyamaree saysL >>>In other news, I too was really puzzled by Jane’s description of teachers, nurses and social workers as not “everyday people.”  To me, it doesn’t get more everyday than those professions. Trust me, it’s not those people keeping the theraputic culture going, as they benefit from it no more than anyone else subjected…

Well, to start.   I wasn’t really suggesting that novels should harp on things like the truly awful smells of Medieval Europe.  I only meant that it’s a very rare historical novel that doesn’t get lots of fairly significant things wrong.  When it’s an era I’m very familiar with, I find I don’t suspend my disbelief…

I wonder if  one of the requirements of finding pleasure in an historical novel is that the reader know little or nothing about the historical period being portrayed.  I bring that up because I know quite a lot about the middle ages, and virtually the only mystery set in that era that I can read…

I suppose I could really start this post by complaining about the suggestion that the nation should conscript its eighteen year olds to do things like build roads or teach the alphabet to inner city school children, and part of me really wants to do that. One of the people you’d have to fight if…

Before I get into Wsard Churchill and the dangers of narrative, let me put in a good word for Plato here.  And Aristotle.  And all the rest of the Greek writers, philosophers or otherwise. It’s not true that it never occurred to Plato to question slavery–he did, and so did most other Greek thinkers, just…

So, everybody is ranting today.  It’s always interesting to see what gets this sort of thing going. But right now, I want to take a look at the end of John’s post, which asks why intellectuals all bash their own country, and why the Pope apologized for the Crusades. I think I would buy a…

The barbarians are at the gate because we sent them an invitation engraved in deconstructionist gibberish and philological minutiae.     –John Heath   The quote above is from an article called “Self Promotion and the Crisis in Classics,” which was included in a book of essays by Victor  Davis Hanson, Bruce Thornton and John Heath called Bonfire of…

Let’s start with John, who says he had  a compostion course in 1954, and the he learned to hate Milton and Hardy in it. What he actually had was something we’d now called “Lit and Comp”–essentially a standard intro to Literature course with a writing compoment, meant to teach students to write about fiction, poetry…

First, to answer Cheryl’s question–a propriety school is a school that’s run for profit, like a business. Most private colleges and universities in the  United States are non-profit corporations.  They aren’t expected to make money for anybody.  They don’t pay dividends.  And they’re not fly by nights.  Many of them–the big names like Harvard, Yale, Amherst, …

Cherly asks why, in America, local community colleges don’t contract with local businesses to teach the skills those businesses need–but, of course, they do. The problem is that, when it comes to communications skills, to the abilit to read and write coherently, the methods the community colleges, and the high schools, and the four year…