A pun for fun

Prepare to groan.

Derive bye
By Mike Sullivan/ Trader in a Fishbowl
Tuesday, March 29, 2005 – Updated: 10:23 AM EST

They popped a cap in my class. I enrolled in a Latin course as a bona fide way to learn the roots of our language. We only met twice. Two women and myself. It was fun, but the school canceled the program. My classmates suggested we continue our studies each week at the local tavern. I like the idea. And I'm fully prepared to drink and derive.

What are my career prospects in Classics teaching?

“I teach Latin in a secondary school and am concerned that the failure of the government's classics project means I will be out of a job shortly. Should I worry?”

I don't know whether the questions in the Guardian's 'Career Doctor' feature are genuine or fabricated, but this one must surely be in a lot of minds just now. You can read the answer given in The Guardian here.

In a word, the Doctor (who?) says that 'hard' subjects like Physics and Latin are dropping out of the curriculum. He or she does go on to give some comfort and indeed some bracing advice, with some (to me) arcane references to professional football. (Here endeth my out-of-touch-Judge impression!)

Attaboy, Nathanael!

Here's a vigorous critique of contemporary (chiefly American) education and a call to return to the Classics. It's a book review from Oregon State University's 'Daily Barometer'.

Building bridges to the fifth century B.C. and beyond

by Nathanael Blake
The Daily Barometer

“Anyone setting out to defend what Jay Albert Nock once called 'the grand old fortifying classical curriculum' — essentially Greek and Latin — does so knowing that he flies the tattered flag of a lost cause.” Tracy Lee Simmons begins his book “Climbing Parnassus” with this appraisal, and proceeds to raise that banner over the beleaguered barricades of classical education.

The triumph of the campaign against Western Civilization may be seen at our own school. OSU offers no courses in the languages that began our culture, preferring to spend its resources on courses like “NFM216 — Food in Non-Western Culture,” “PHL599 — 002 — Feminist Epistemology,” “EXSS475 — Power and Privilege in Sport,” and “WS299 — Witches, Midwives, and Healers.”

Against such anti-intellectual debasement of education, Mr. Simmons sets a robust vision that challenges students to greatness. For though few students have the capacity to excel, “When aims are pitched high, even a partial failure leads to ultimate success. The climb itself builds muscles, even if we don't reach the top.”

Most everyone agrees that education in America is a mess. But the solutions generally offered (from the left — more money; from the right — more accountability) don't consider that the problem may not lie in the execution but in the ideal.

Few today consider the radical difference between today's educational methods and curriculum and that of classical education. Many cannot even define a classical education: the study of the great languages and literature (from the poetic to the philosophical) of Western Civilization.

“Climbing Parnassus” makes its case in clear prose, and relying on authority beyond the author's own, it regularly bolsters its case by citing luminaries spanning from Plato and Socrates to T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis. Simmons' first task is to critique modern education, and in this, as he warns in the preface, “A few forbidden things.”

He leads with a withering critique of our education system and the culture it is spawning. He relates W.H. Auden's musings over what the ancients might think of us: “Yes, I can see all the works of a great civilization, but why cannot I meet any civilized persons? I only encounter specialists, artists who know nothing of science, scientists who know nothing of art, philosophers who have no interest in God, priests who are unconcerned with politics, politicians who know only other politicians.”

Read the rest
here

So, would you get into university?

Sample questions from an American test show the kind of problem that all candidates for universities will have to tackle if two exam boards have their way.

The University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (Ucles) and the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) put forward these proposals today. The test assesses the ability to think rather than subject knowledge.

It seems to me to be rather like an intelligence test, or even like the Eleven Plus. Any school worth its salt will immediately start to coach its sixth formers for the test if it is introduced. But it may work.

Read the Guardian report here.

A Latin dictionary cum revision aid, perhaps

I came across a simple Latin dictionary that could be a useful classroom/homework tool.

It is small and easy to download (program 276 kb, word list 198 kb), and you can add words of your own without difficulty. It claims to have Latin to English : 8 737 words, English to Latin : 11 786 words. So it's a fair size.

You can look up words in the usual way, whater E-L or L-E, but you can also use the dictionary in another way. Go through the list of Latin words and select the ones you want into a folder (you might choose to call one folder GCSE), and then you can set the program to show you each Latin word, followed after a few seconds by its English meaning, as a vocab learning aid, or to display the Latin word and let you enter the meaning, as a self-test.

Since the program is very simple, as programs go, it is probably vulnerable to fiddling with, but it seems to me to have possibilities, and since it's free, downloads and sets up in a few minutes, and has its own program removal process, you might as well try it!