What your race is, or your gender or your income level or your educational accomplishment or your social station is less important than what your culture is. What civilization do you believe in, or do you believe in one at all?

Major excerpt from my forthcoming book, An Abundance of Caution. Ultimately, this book is not about the pandemic. It is about the failure of the expert class. Link in reply.

2/ Those testing above modal age would be the cohort that was earlier held back. Here's what I found for white students. The MS reforms were enacted in 2013, by the way.

4/ Here is how the situation looks for Black students.

The "Reading Deniers". What an appropriate term for those who, for decades, have dismissed the mountain of evidence that the teaching of phonics is the best means of insuring students can read.

"Of old the Hellenic race was marked off from the barbarian as more keen-witted and more free from nonsense."—Herodotus I:60

Memoria College summer courses in the great books and classical education are now open for enrollment! memoriacollege.org/classes/

"Tragedy is tender to man's dignity and self-importance, and preserves the illusion that he is a noble creature. Comedy uncovers the absurd truth, which is why people are so afraid of being laughed at in real life."—John Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dicken's Imagination,

"An apparently inflexible program of study induced liberated thinking. And we're far from immune from our own inflexible idols: our education system is too often rigid where it should be yielding, and lax where it should be rigid."—Scott Newstok, How to Think Like Shakespeare, p.

I saw several new Starbucks coffee locations when I was in Rome recently. This is sort of like opening a Target store on Rodeo Drive.

Right because our chief problem is that we do not rely too much on technology already.

"Like his true precursor, whoever it was that wrote Ecclesiastes . . . Johnson is disturbing & unconventional, a moralist altogether idiosyncratic. Johnson is to England what Emerson is to America, Goethe to Germany, & Montaigne to France: the national sage." Harold Bloom

The test of classic style in anything—from clothing to cars—is whether, ten, twenty, fifty years later, that style still looks stylish.

“Phonics works for some but not all” is educational malpractice dressed up as nuance. - ALL kids benefit from learning it. - Some kids need it to learn to read. - No one is harmed by it.

James A. Furey MartinCothran My five year old can read very well for his age because when he learns how a word sounds once, he can read it each time he encounters it in the future, but I’m still going through teaching him phonics because memorizing can only go so far.

Some commentator on CNN is talking about how "impactful" Pope Francis was. If I die and someone calls me "impactful", I will come back to haunt them.

The word "impactful" marks one off as someone who does not read good books. I am an editor (among other things), and if I see this word in a submission, I read no further. It is an immediate disqualification. It is the quintessence of jargon.

"[John Dewey generated] at least two of the misconceptions that now ripple American education: the use of schools to solve social and political problems and the depreciation of academics in favor of assorted activities."—Henry T. Edmondson III, John Dewey & the Decline of

nationalreview.com/corner/mandato…

If you want to learn the Greek myths, do yourself a favor and get Edith Hamilton's excellent book, beautifully rendered by Black Dog & Levanthal Publishers.