“Shakespeare who?” ask Canadian students
The greatest English writer who ever lived is a dead white man, and so several school districts in Canada have decided to disappear him:
The Greater Essex County District School Board in the Windsor, Ont., area is supplanting its grade 11 literature curriculum, which up to now has featured great writers of the western canon such as Shakespeare and George Orwell, with a year-long program of Indigenous writers. The change has already been effected in eight of the district’s 15 schools.
In the Peel district as well, I am informed by a reader, the same transformation is in progress. It would be naïve to assume that these schools will remain anomalies for long. The “disappearing” of dead white European male writers, however magnificent their achievements, may well be normalized across Canada before long.
And it also seems appropriately ironic that Orwell – who knew all too well the ways in which oppressive states seek to “disappear” unapproved people and their works – is going down the Canadian memory hole himself.
What is replacing Shakespeare the genius? Contemporary indigenous novels such as this one which focuses on the cruelty that was perpetrated on the Indians of Canada (Native Canadians?):
As a response to Truth and Reconciliation Commision, the public school board’s trustees passed a motion in 2016 to develop an Indigenous education protocol in response to calls for action.
Since this decision, eight of 15 high schools have replaced Grade 11 English course materials with Indigenous books including Indian Horse, In this Together and Seven Fallen Feathers.
The new course is called Understanding Contemporary First Nations, Métis and Inuit Voices.
So instead of learning the pearls of the Western canon, students in these districts are to remain ignorant of those achievements in favor of the study of literature that I think we can safely predict will not stand the test of time but will nevertheless serve the new overriding pedagogical goal of making the majority of students feel guilty about themselves and their culture.
Hmm. I suspect that encouraging young minds to hate/be bored with learning and intellectualism is not going to work out quite the way these Canadians expect.
Mike
You have teachers who aren’t interested in literature or you have administrators who aren’t interested in liberal education, or you have a combination of the two.
From Shakespeare to Shaking a Spear (From a snowmobile)…Sweet Meteor of Death, please hurry!
Some of this is also based on an effort to “engage” students in order to improve their skills and has been going on for long time in schools. Hasn’t worked out all that well, of course.
So what? Today the high school diploma is a worthless piece of paper indicating you sat in class for 12 years. A high school diploma used to mean you could do reading, writing and arithmetic. Now it’s like a participation ribbon. I saw a study about 25 years ago that claimed that about 25% of high school graduates were functionally illiterate. It was put out by people promoting phonics so I thought they were exaggerating but now I believe they were correct.
I saw a study about 25 years ago that claimed that about 25% of high school graduates were functionally illiterate.
‘Functionally illiterate’ is a term similar to ‘food insecurity’. It’s messing around with the goalposts to justify hiring more people from the occupational guild making the claim.
Kids in UK think Churchill was fiction and Sherlock Holmes was real.
Gramcsi is the theoritician behind this.
I’m so sick of this.
When I was a teenager I conned my mother into buying a set of the Great Books — Plato, Shakespeare, Galileo, Montaigne, the Federalist Papers, Tolstoy, etc. — because in the 60s, American middlebrow culture was so strong, even in a nondescript Florida town I knew that was what I was supposed to know or try to know. Good times.
I only got through the Iliad and some of the essays but I browsed most of the volumes and got the idea of what a real education looked like. I considered going to St. John’s College because it offered a curriculum based on the Great Books.
I’m still working on that reading list. I’m grateful I grew up in a time when the canon was valued. It never occurred to me then that we could end up junking the Great Books.
It’s messing around with the goalposts to justify hiring more people from the occupational guild making the claim.
Dunbar HS in DC is now holding an “engineering workshop” and has <1% students competent in math.
If it twernt for feminism, and its global helpers, this would not be..
not my problem… not my circus, not my monkeys
and since they made sure i could not have a family, i really dont give a rats ass
and made sure what i worked on, was a waste of time too..
not my problem anymore…
Artfldgr on November 20, 2019 at 4:17 pm said:
Quit your damned narcissistic puling. You and your, “They’re not letting me be a man” whining. Who the hell raised you, anyway?
Stop it! Get a set of barbells or something. For God’s sake. Haven’t you ever herad of fighting back? Do you need permission and enabling for everything?
Come on Art, you have the potential for being better than that.
I went there huxley, they are still plugging away.
Yeah, “First Nations” among the Canadian “Peoplekind”.
Geez, though. Who will mourn for the Dorset? You know those first, of the first nations who the Inuit legends record themselves as pushing off the land and out of the villages they lived in.
Now that genetic evidence has given the lie to the hopeful idea that the Inuit “absorbed” the Dorset, we might profitably scan the Wiki article history pages for changes in the paragraphs concerning the Dorset replacement. In any event it should be mentioned, enough times so that it isn’t missed, that there is no smoking gun proof, like video for example, that the Inuit perpetrated a genocide, or even ever came across the people who their legends describe them as driving out.
Then there’s the Erie extermination by other Iroquois, the flight of the Potawatomi, the near destruction of the Huron nation … But you know … Shakespeare.
Well, as you know, Hutchins and Adler were themselves reacting to what they perceived as a defection from the classically regarded great works of civilization when they introduced the idea and series.
It’s a perennial debate. My own opinion is that some texts are critical and some are much less so. In my view Plato for the most part is, and including “The Laws” wherein he introduces what appear to be his own ideas, more respectable in my opinion. You could trash Rival Lovers and no one would care. Probably not his work anyway.
Aristotle, yes, essential. Especially: Topics, De Interpretatione, some review of Prior and Posterior Analytics [though they are kind of tough due to translation problems which I understand make some doctrines problematical] Ethics, Politics, and Metaphysics, all pay.
The Iliad in a good translation is great. The Odyssey makes a better kid’s movie than a read. And I could never get even part way through the Aeneid.
Thucydides is important but tough to read in my opinion, as there is no moral center as I would recognize one, and almost everyone in it seems worthy of the miserable fates they experience.
I think people don’t have enough appreciation for the Bible. I always like Kings, and got a charge out of Jehu having Jezebel tossed down to the pavement, or his commanding the priests of Baal to attend a clebratory feast and having them all slaughtered. [There’s a rough parallel of sorts at the end of the Odyssey with Penelope’s suitors, isn’t there …]
The guy certainly got off to a good start. Then something went awry. LOL
“making the majority of students feel guilty about themselves and their culture” neo
That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. In fact, it’s the entire point and goal.
“I suspect that encouraging young minds to hate/be bored with learning and intellectualism is not going to work out quite the way these Canadians expect.” MBunge
Western Europe’s coming fall to Islam is proof that encouraging young minds to hate the culture their ancestors created is an effective strategy. “As Sweden goes…” https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/11/18/as-sweden-goes/
DNW,
Artfldgr’s obsessive focus on feminism and communism notwithstanding… he’s not entirely wrong;
“Feminism as Gender Terrorism: The Mortal Vendetta Against the Male Sex”
Mortimer Adler, one of the creators of the Great Books Program that’s used at St. John’s, put much of the problem with education down to the influence of John Dewey — in an obit on Adler:
Adler wasn’t a creator of St. John’s program, though he may have consulted Barr and Buchanan a bit, along with others. Too, the program changed somewhat over time, becoming more contextually integrated as the years passed.
Ray,
I don’t know a great deal about elementary teaching skills, but I have a friend who used to go on about phonics when she was home schooling (did I just trigger someone?). I got the basics in phonics as a kid. I mean, shouldn’t kids know how to break words into syllables and pronounce those syllables? I found this on one of the big alternatives.
Wow! Holism and gestaltism. Don’t you want to jump on that bandwagon?
____
But to Neo’s theme, I had read some article recently concerning efforts to convince Norwegians and Swedes to ignore or denigrate their own 1K-year+ history of economic and cultural successes and instead focus on the wonders of the slightly older Sami culture, the indigenous Finno-Ugric people inhabiting Sápmi region, also known as Laplanders.
It would be funny, if it weren’t so sad. These worshipers of primitivism won’t be happy until most of us are either dead or living like Ted Kaczynski.
_____
My exposure to literature in my youth was a bit like Huxley’s though even less structured or more free-formed. The two things I regret slightly is that I wished I had read some about the books before reading them. Perspective is hard to come by as a kid. And secondly, I wish I had some appreciation of how leftist English profs. had already infected the lists of great works of literature even back then.
Oh, F. Scott Fitzgerald is absolutely America’s best author! He’s good, but no. Perceiving the problems associated with great wealth is interesting, but it doesn’t automatically make somebody a great author.
A friend of mine did send one or two of her kids to St. Johns.
For more on Mortimer Adler, see this YouTube video for a bit of gossipy stuff: https://youtu.be/Hp5kLBYxgEA (pull the slider to 24:50 to begin).
Oh yeah, I can see why they would want to make Orwell disappear. He hits too close to home for comfort. Especially since it looks as if we’re actually going to be issued newspeak dictionaries.
My niece is a recent english lit grad from a large state university..
She has never heard of George Orwell nor Jane Austen nor Dante’s Inferno.
The major has become so politically correct that the assigned readings were short excerpts (within textbooks) of books by authors who had the “proper” color, gender and political qualifications.
I recall my undergrad days – long ago – where we engineering students were assigned lit / humanities courses specifically for us somewhat illiterate engineers.
We were assigned some of Orwell’s books, Dante’s Inferno, Homer’s Odyssey and, purely as literature, the Old Testament.
When I first entered that class I would have bet my bank account (about 50 bucks in 1971 dollars or in 2019 dollars, about $250 ) that I would hate that course.
But much to my surprise I really enjoyed it.
Not that long ago I read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (taking a break from my history readings), motivated to do so after watching the movie.
What a great book!!
The favorite part was the lengthy dressing down of Darcy by Liz Bennet. She basically told Darcy to F-off and go to hell in the most beautiful english prose and without uttering a single word that could be considered “inappropriate.”
Austen’s command of the English language was truly remarkable.
By the way, getting back on topic, today’s college grads are voters; that is the real scary part, esp. considering their total ignorance of history.
No wonder so many young people are all for socialism.
I went there huxley, they are still plugging away.
sdferr: So you went to St. John’s? Which one? How did you like it?
As it happens my stepmother worked as a secretary in St. John’s, Santa Fe. I had a church friend who got himself thrown out of SJ for being too much of an evangelical Christian. Or so he tells it.
I went to Annanoplace as we called it. Greatest time of my life.
sdferr:
This is at Wikipedia, and may not be correct, but it does align with what I’ve read elsewhere:
The Great Books program (often called simply “the Program” or “the New Program” at St. John’s) was developed at the University of Chicago by Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, Robert Hutchins, and Mortimer Adler in the mid-1930s as an alternative form of education to the then rapidly changing undergraduate curriculum. St. John’s adopted the Great Books program in 1937, when the college was facing the possibility of financial and academic ruin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_College_(Annapolis/Santa_Fe)
Hutchins with Adler had already put together a going core curriculum program in Chicago; Barr and Buchanan were offered the opportunity to rebuild the failing school in Annapolis and they knew and talked with Hutchins and Adler, taking advice and encouragement from them. They had their own ideas though and instituted them. And y’know, wiki. There are histories out there though.
DNW on November 20, 2019 at 4:53 pm said:
What do you suggest? they already took my family away, the judge told me i had no rights, then let the kid go with a woman that used him and her two kids to rob a bank… but that was after she faked her murder, and had the police destroy my career, lose my home, chapter 13 bankruptcy, and yet… i couldnt have custody over her.. so i ended up paying double custody… one went to the lady that did all that, the other went to my parents who the boy lived with.
at that period i was homeless…
built up a life… got married.. have a nice place
but alas… going to be homeless again, as no one is hiring old white males with no connections and the past i got for actualy doing none of it
so.. what do you suggest?
the designs i have, they are not interested in, you know, kind of like the teacher ignoring the kid who holds his hand up wanting others to answer instead..
how about SBA 8a program… damn, that wont work, i am a male, and dont meet their qualifications as its all reserved for guess..
what about schooling? after all, when i got out of bronx science, i couldnt get any scholarships or aid… none… nada… despite an almost perfect SAT score… however, my sis who did not go to science, has many degrees, cause well, you figure it out
so what do you suggest? i have designs, tech, skills and more..
maybe if i get those weights and i lift i can be bigger than my 6’2″ 235 frame
too old to go out and be a bouncer… technically last month i became a senior citzen… dont have family support… dont have friends given those prior things destroyed all i had from when i was young, and now just a few.. but they are retired and are older than me, so skirted this stuff.
despite being a signed celebrity photog, no one interested.. tried galleries… but they are all featureing young oppressed women and social justice.. i even tried neo, but she has her good reasons, and that isnt going to change..
i tried helping but after they get the work, they dissapear, and dont reciprocate
wife is now working 16 hour days cleaning houses… she is from indonesia (and if you say i should have married someone else, i would really be pissed at you)
so what do you suggest?
and why should i care and fight the good fight for a society that took everything?
my dad came from the shoa… dp camps… but that dont matter i am not diverse enough… i didnt have a childhood working hard to go to bx science… and to go to college, i slept on park benches homeless (first time)… when they used to set people on fire for fun in nyc.. used to wash in the sinks at the port authority so i could attend classes.. barely got my degree…
have no degrees of note
lost all my network from that one person
my lifetime savings was pinched hey from my partners
rebuilt it, but its for my wife when i am gone, as there isnt enough for both
i work every day, morning to night, do not go out, do not have guys to do stuff with, just work work work… and its not enough..
i even tried to bring up these subjects here, but they dont get traction
and yet, i DO get enough traction for someone who didnt have people like that in their lives to say, what you did
so… what do you suggest that doesnt have a jail sentence with it?
by the way, i have a LOT more than potential..
but if they arent buying, i cant force them to!!!!!
what do you do when your very presence causes the company to lose diversity?
what do they do when you want to be hired and you would make their pledge to diversity a lie?
yes, blackface is out…
sex with men is out, wife wont like it
growing up in an inner city slum and being homeless dont count
do you want to team up and work on bringing the chip to market?
how about the software that writes software?
how about the other product designs?
want to represent me and my art and sell that?
what about the archetectural designs (but have no degree so cant work there)
then the websites and other tech.. i can do AI, but since i havent, i cant
suggest away… be interesting to hear..
as all i do is try.. and i really dont have time to save the world from the stupid stuff its doing to itself… i wasted 20 years doing that and have nothing for it… those extra minutes would have been better used to build up something for my wife and old age… but no, i fought the good fight.. even tried to do it here… not much luck, as the stuff thats easily talked about now, i was talking about 10 years ago… and now its futile… the only people wanting to save anything are closer to death than the people who are going to change it.
lets hear your suggestions and i will let you know if i tried it yet..
I would like to recommend Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zim. We need a great deal of debunking the left’s sacred texts. Ignoring the Bard is tearing down Western Civilization and caucasian males in general. For those who champion this insidious agenda please turn in the following:
Cell phones
Computers
Electricity
Airplanes and/or tickets
Anything related to the internal combustion engine
Steam powered engines
Modern Medicine
And the beat goes on
Not saying white males were solely responsible for the above, but it is white males who were largely responsible for producing first world economies and the progress of real science. Or choose, if you are honest and sincere, to avoid what white males have made possible in your guilt riddled petty lives.
Embrace superstition and a third world live style. I double dog dare you.
Live style = life style, I assume . . . so, Nietzsche baby! Western civ! What can’t it do?
There are two things about Shakespeare which make him worth studying. First, his insight into human nature and the human mind is timeless. Second, he was the master craftsman of English. Even for people whose direct ancestry was not English, here we are, and we speak English. Someone up above said the Bible is also underrated as literature. True. The language of the KJV permeates English-language writing. It should be studied for that reason alone, if not for moral or religious reasons.
Someone up above said the Bible is also underrated as literature. True. The language of the KJV permeates English-language writing. It should be studied for that reason alone, if not for moral or religious reasons.
Kate: Amen. The good writers and poets used to say that a lot. Perhaps not so much now.
My friend’s kids went to St. John’s Annapolis and I knew of that reputation. I’ve spent some time in Santa Fe, and had been exposed to a bit of content from that St. Johns and was unaware that they were connected. The content seemed to be a bit new-agey. Then there was the relative of mine who went to St. Johns stuck out in the middle of a forest near St. Cloud, MN. Not connected at all, and not the best for him.
One might say Shakespeare read Plutarch, Plutarch read Plato, Plato read Homer, Homer read men and women. So there we go.
“Truth and Reconciliation Commission”—now there is an Orwellian title.
Indigenous Canadian literature, what a joke!
The Canucks are such fools, such foolish people. Just see their current PM. Why did he get elected? Because he was the son of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who did such a shitty but sanctimonious job that his worthless son had to ascend to the same role.
Canucks are useless.
Ken Kesey, author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and the main proto-hippie character described in Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” spoke at an Oregon library in 1976. Some excerpts:
As everyone knows, people aren’t reading as well as they did when we were younger, for a number of reasons. There is a “Sesame Street” — “Welcome Back, Kotter” consciousness that has crept in not only to our homes but into our schools and into our libraries. And gradually as these trendy things that I call “earthshoes” work their way in, something good drops off at the other end and finally what you’re left with is a lot of fashion and nothing that’s eternal.
…
I don’t know whether this book [I Will Fight No More Forever] is a good book or bad book, but I know the consciousness that puts it on the library shelves. It comes from a certain pressure; it is not coming out of literature. It is coming from somebody saying, “Read some Indian stuff, read some women’s stuff, read some black stuff.”
…
I looked through all these books the high school kids are reading. They’re not getting Faulkner; they’re not getting Hemingway; they’re not getting Melville; they’re getting me.
I’m not a classic. I’m not a wart on a classic’s butt yet. I’m working at it, I may make it as a classic, but I know I’m not in there with Moby Dick yet. You don’t need to teach Cuckoo’s Nest; there’s nothing to be said about it. It’s a simple Christ allegory taking place in a nuthouse…. The reason that it’s taught is so that they can catch these kids’ attention.
–Ken Kesey, “Earthshoes & Other Remarks”
Kesey was more conservative than many realize.
No, I don’t think Art is entirely wrong. In fact, in the broader scheme of things, I think he is largely right; but that he is not as uniquely perceptive, or well informed as he imagines, his intellectual abilities notwithstanding.
And his bitter indictments of those who do not respond as he would wish when he would wish, and as usually accompanied by an accusatory garnish of some kind directed at readers, wears, very, very, thin. Where did he get such authority and presumption? What effen culture is he part of where such damned insolence is deemed normal? Whose property does he think we are?
Now, does he have virtues which are apparent even here? Yes. Might he have nearly all the virtues and qualities he claims to have, to nearly the extent he claims them? Possibly.
He does have a job. He has a woman. He’s not a failure.
Does he need me, or anyone else to sell his artworks? Not in the age of the Internet. And Amazon, and Ebay. Though I’d certainly be interested in seeing some examples.
If this following guy’s art (and I happen to like this one) can sell (and note the sizes of the prints and different media), I have no doubt that a man with Artfllledggreer’s talents could do as well.
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/sound-2019-alex-caminker.html?product=framed-print
Funny, this. I have an older cousin [Vietnam PTSD case] who has won awards for almost miraculously beautiful and creative wood carvings of plants (one a 4ft tall Jack-in-the-pulpit) and man made artifacts – well beyond anything you might imagine in the complexity and blended colors of the selected woods, in sizes both large and small, in elaborateness, in beauty and verisimilitude. And I cannot get him to sell them. He just makes them and stores them away. And then there are other guys who manage to sell those stupid chain sawn totem poles for a profit from out in front of their houses on the highway.
Go figure.
Very interesting posting and conversation. Thanks all. :>))
A phonics and Faulkner story?
Decades ago I spent a whole day guiding a group of Japanese college girls around the city. Their English was quite weak but everyone had a good time. At the end of the day I took two of the girls back to their foreign exchange parents where we had time for some more conversation.
What classes are you taking? What do you study in your English class? She replied, “We read a lot of William Faulkner and write.” (Knock me over with a feather.) I said, “I take it you don’t do much conversation in English?” No, no. Or phonics. This was back when the Japanese were going to rule the world (their kids were reading Faulkner after all) and we would all eventually perish from global cooling.
_____
DNW,
Your story about your older cousin reminds me of the Vivian Maier story. I had seen the documentary film which is amazing. At least your cousin has won awards, but poor Vivian didn’t even make it that far.
My issue with artfldgr is not his rambling, it is with his asumption that we are all are not only ignorant, but also stupid. Sorry artfldgr to know your trials and woes. Î can symphàtise, but your arrogance….. meh.
What happens when you remove Shakespeare (et al.) from the curriculum:
https://twitter.com/Zencsss/status/1196936139136995330?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1197119507648712704&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blazingcatfur.ca%2F
(H/T: BlazingCatFur blog)
DNW: Does he need me, or anyone else to sell his artworks? Not in the age of the Internet. And Amazon, and Ebay.
I was amazed at the range of art sold on etsy.com by people from around the world. The wider availability of CNC machines has fostered a range of new ideas in the realm of art.
Shakespeare’s not the only one who’s not in the curriculum. I was at the jewelry counter when a young lady came in looking for a chain with a cross on it. After being shown several she asked, “Do you have one with the little man on it?”
Students find that Shakespeare is hard to understand. They need easier authors to study.
“Do you have one with the little man on it?”
Eva Marie: Priceless!
I was once in a church choir and the first soprano told a story of overhearing two women after a performance of Bach’s “Passion According to St. John.” One said to the other, “Imagine what Bach could have done if he didn’t have to write church music.”
“Imagine what Bach could have done if he didn’t have to write church music.”
Heh.
Father even more children?
Slightly off topic: Is there a correlation between the dates of campus SJW outbursts and the dates of mid-terms and final exams?
It’s probably a lot more fun to be screaming your brains out on the quad than sitting in your dorm room and studying.
@sdferr:
In reply to, “Imagine what Bach could have done if he didn’t have to write church music,” you suggested, “Father even more children?”
Chances are he would have fathered fewer. (At least, if we understand the phrase “didn’t have to write church music” to be a stand-in for “didn’t waste his time with that silly religion nonsense,” which is what I suspect the speaker meant.)
If you take God and His Suffering Servant (Jesus, Israel, and the Church in Christianity; or somewhat more obscurely, the history of The People Israel in Judaism) out of the worldview, then you simultaneously remove any principled basis for believing in meaningful suffering except when it results in later-and-greater pleasures in your own terrestrial life.
For those living in accord with their professed principles, then, the absence of a worldview in which suffering which isn’t visibly rewarded in the life of an individual means there’s no particular reason to endure the hardships of being a parent, let alone a parent of a dozen kids, some of whom may die or become prodigal.
Lots of persons live in a way unconnected to their professed principles, of course. My many atheist (and even reductive-materialist) friends are far better persons than would seem to be permitted by their ideological or philosophical commitments. But in the long run “ideas have consequences.” Show me an Orthodox Jewish couple or one of those few Catholic couples who still believe Catholicism, or even an Evangelical Protestant couple who really live their faith vibrantly, and I’ll show you a house full of kids, nine times out of ten. Show me a reductive-materialist married to another, and I’ll show you a pair of DINKs. (Again, by-and-large, with exceptions.)
As for the main topic of the article (the Leftist cancers metastasizing in education): Homeschool your kids, d***it, everyone!
I didn’t take the sentence in that way at all. And why should I? It was sufficient to me to think of the rigors of the liturgical calendar and therefore the necessity to compose to rule, filling the available time with all manner of demanded performance.
Whereas, freed of such a straight jacket on his time, Bach, I thought in a moment of levity, may have done more of the other thing he showed himself to be capable of doing well (and I’d always heard it was twenty one children, rather more than a mere dozen). Humor, apparently, just won’t do.
When Bach passed his sons were considered better composers. Bach was just a composer who wrote church music. Later when all Bach’s compositions were cataloged people realized he was a genius.
http://bachcentral.com/BWV/BWV.html
@sdferr:
Sorry. I did get the joke you were making, and was amused by the thought. (Hey, the world could always use more congenitally-talented musicians raised in sane households. Usually it seems like we get either tortured geniuses or well-socialized mediocrities!) So, nothing wrong with your humor!
Perhaps I misunderstood the comment quoted by Huxley, to which you were jokingly replying.
Considering it was uttered by some women who’d just heard Bach’s “Passion According to St. John” (a beautiful, exciting, moving piece of music), the remark struck me as tin-eared, vapid, or both.
And…well, I’m a church musician and once-upon-a-time music-leader. I’m used to putting in a lot of work, working with talented and hardworking musicians who really know their stuff, glorifying God with excellence, and then…being shrugged off by secular-minded acquaintances who think of church music as blah but claim that three-chord slop from their favorite local band is somehow “more authentic” because the drummer has a heroin addiction.
But perhaps my own experiences led me to misconstrue the motive of the comment. Sorry for dumping cold water on your joke!
Re: Bach’s procreative count: I didn’t look it up. For all I know he DID have 21 children. As for the liturgical calendar: I actually found that it could either inspire, or distract from, the task of composition. Sometimes setting Psalms to fresh music is more of an opportunity than a hassle. (I could never have managed a whole cantata!) But in truth, caring for kids is a bigger obstacle than merely meeting the demands of the liturgical calendar. There’re only so many hours in the day.
No worries R.C. I too was a church musician, one, in fact whose parents met in a church choir directed by my Granddad. Music was — is — life to me, though not the source of my “living” as we say. And old man Bach was my happiest theologian.
Considering it was uttered by some women who’d just heard Bach’s “Passion According to St. John” (a beautiful, exciting, moving piece of music), the remark struck me as tin-eared, vapid, or both.
R.C. Indeed!
The story happened in San Francisco. I believe the woman’s point, as you say, was that church music and Christianity must have held Bach back — that’s what religion does, right? Missing the fact that Bach was a deep Christian and his church provided the environment which allowed his genius to flourish.
sdferr: 🙂
Oh yes, people! Home school your children!
When I undertook to home school mine it was as much to get control of our family’s schedule and be able to travel as to ensure a ‘classical’ academic program. That was almost 20 years ago. Back then, the sins of the educational establishment, more or less, were sins of omission, not commission. Not any more.
Between unscientific gender propaganda in the early grades and the ‘relevant, deconstructed’ canon in the upper grades, the current ‘curriculum’ – I use the term loosely – seems to have become thoroughly and deliberately debased. And now math is ‘white privilege’.
Frankly, subjecting a child to this is intellectual and spiritual abuse.
I keep waiting to hear about a new wave of secular home schoolers, but nothing so far. Are the parents of school age children that brainwashed and apathetic or is a movement happening and going unreported?
I keep waiting to hear about a new wave of secular home schoolers
Molly Brown: Mostly those who can, send their kids to private/parochial schools, do. The kids attending my old Catholic high school today aren’t linked by faith but by professional parents.
Of course, as an ex-hippie-commune-guy, I’m all for homeschooling. John Holt, whom wiki credits with writing the homeschooling Bible, was a hero in my circles.
A couple of commune friends homeschooled their kids from their Arkansas homestead. But it looks like a tough gig in the city with both parents mostly working.
I get the impression that there are a lot of ‘educators’ who aren’t themselves really interested in *knowledge* and are unable to grasp why anyone else would be. Hence the need to blend each and every field of learning with *other stuff* until everything from literature to physics to engineering is turned into Social Studies.
I have long suspected that a significant part of the curriculum in most educational institutions is to stifle or sidetrack any signs of creativity that might appear in the students. But now they seem to have added the additional task of eliminating the greatest works of creativity so that no-one will be forced to encounter them. It is rather sad watching a once-great civilization slowly commit suicide, isn’t it?
Creativity is too much work for those who have already made up their minds.
LOL Hey, I tried going to church once. “Peace and justice, peace and justice la la la la …” Puke.
It did provide a nice opportunity for 15 minutes (figuratively speaking) of fame, or at least crowd-focus status, for a crew sacrament administrators to solemnly exercise their right of participation … you know … “inclusion”.
I have long suspected that a significant part of the curriculum in most educational institutions is to stifle or sidetrack any signs of creativity that might appear in the students.
Who gives a sh!t? Students need mastery. A few will benefit from cultivating creativity. Later.
@DNW:
I feel ya’, I really do. I defer to no one in my disgust with the treacly Marty Haugen / Dan Schutte style of hymnody, and all-too-many of their more-recently-penned sentimental equivalents in the Praise and Worship genre.
I suspect, in your case, there’s a good remedy: Find someplace practicing the Tridentine Latin Mass, or else the Divine Worship of a Catholic parish of the Anglican Ordinariate, or a good “Eastern Catholic” Divine Liturgy.
But don’t just walk in unprepared. The whole point of anyone going is to unite to do something, much of which is invisible. For the unprepared visitor, that can be a mix of beautiful and incomprehensible.
Get a good book explaining what it’s all about, and what folk are doing, and then go. To be sure, you’ll still be “outside” in the sense of not being able to do what they’re doing. But you’d at least see with your waking eyes that there are still men in the world who, without the least trace of sentimentalism, continue to practice the faith backed by a tough-minded insistence on truth.
Of course I’m just making a suggestion; or perhaps a mild exhortation. But even a man such as yourself, whose prior experiences with church have been drawn from the dregs, can benefit from knowing that NOT ALL Christians have been reduced to Jell-O. Some “spine” is still there, even if you have to go to out-of-the-way places to find it.