Masada TV series now on DVD

See the Amazon website for details and reviews. This is the Peter O'Toole mini-series from 1981. I used to show it on tape to classes studying the Masada part of the Cambridge Latin Course.

Specialist Language College and Classics – a request

cath currie
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  School | george abbot school guildford
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   Topic | Classics in specialist language colleges
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   Query | Our school has justy been awarded specialist language college status and I wondered if any fellow Classicists out there had experience of teaching classics in such an establishment and was willing to share ideas ?
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   Email | ccurrie.ga(at)webmail.digitalbrain.com

Congratulations to Cath and to George Abbot School.

135 photos of excavation in Rome

Thanks to Explorator for this link to Professor Martin Conde's photos of excavations in the Forum/Palatine areas of Rome.

Dorothy Sayers on The Lost Tools of Learning

A registration on the ArLT website (welcome, Mark!) led me to the website of the Liberty Classical Academy in Maplewood, MN, and to the page which publishes Dorothy Sayers' Oxford speech called The Lost Tools of Learning.

The picture she paints of western society and its flight from reason and the ability to reason is even more true to life today than when she gave the speech in 1947.

I am sure that it's worth reading in full, though I haven't yet done so. Here are a few choice morsels:

• Bishops air their opinions about economics; biologists, about metaphysics; inorganic chemists, about theology [did anyone mention Richard Dawkins?].
• The modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjects—but does that always mean that they actually know more?
• Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the
  proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has
  ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of
  advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and
  unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the
  press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to
  distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy
  suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good
  than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the
  proven from the plausible?
• Have you ever been faintly troubled by the amount of slipshod syntax going about?
• We find a well-known biologist writing in a weekly paper to the effect
  that: “It is an argument against the existence of a Creator” (I think
  he put it more strongly; but since I have, most unfortunately, mislaid
  the reference, I will put his claim at its lowest)–“an argument
  against the existence of a Creator that the same kind of variations
  which are produced by natural selection can be produced at will by
  stock breeders.” One might feel tempted to say that it is rather an
  argument for the existence of a Creator.

  Actually, of course, it is neither; all it proves is that the same
  material causes (recombination of the chromosomes, by crossbreeding,
  and so forth) are sufficient to account for all observed
  variations—just as the various combinations of the same dozen tones are
  materially sufficient to account for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and
  the noise the cat makes by walking on the keys. But the cat’s
  performance neither proves nor disproves the existence of Beethoven;
  and all that is proved by the biologist’s argument is that he was
  unable to distinguish between a material and a final cause. [Step forward R.D.]