Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: An adaptation in clay

HT:Clarion Journal

Winning is the Most Important Thing!

“There’s more to sports than winning.” “It’s not about winning and losing.” “Winning isn’t the most important thing.”

Those types of platitudes surround sports today, especially youth sports. And I have to admit:

I don’t understand them.

If you’re playing a competitive sport, you’re playing to win. That is the only substantive good that runs through all competition: baseball, cross-country, checkers, bass fishing, NASCAR, beer pong, poker. Winning. That’s the point of competition.

Does that mean that competitive sports don’t have other benefits? Of course not. Some (track) get you into shape, others (chess) help your ability to concentrate, some (poker) make you money, some (beer pong) get you buzzed. Every form of competition (except maybe NASCAR) has an ancillary benefit, but it’s not a benefit that’s necessary to the pursuit of competition in general. Such benefits are what the Schoolmen might call “accidents” of competition.

Accidents aren’t substances. When it comes to competitive sports, winning is the form that makes competition what it is. It is the essence of competition. If you’re not playing to win, you’re denying the core nature of competition, and it’s no longer competition. If you don’t want to play to win, that’s fine. Take up knitting or walking a treadmill . . . but get off the daggone track.

Now, does all this mean that winning is the most important thing?”

Read the rest at The Daily Eudemon

Ancient Chants from the Church in Rome

HT: Aeneas’ Quest

The Birth of Beer

“Cultural Anthropologists speculate that some ancient nomad stumbled upon a liquid of fermented grains and , intrigued took a sip. The biter-tasting brew was strangly pleasing, and each successive sip induced a sense of warmth, well being, and extreme happiness- even giddiness.

There was only one explanation for this magical amber liquid: a gift from the earth mother. And, clearly there was only one thing for our ancestors to do; make more of it.”- From The Little Black Book of Beer

Also check out “Beer, It’s Older Than You Think” at Buzzle.com

Greek Letters and Orthodoxy

Greek Letters and Orthodoxy:Their Relations During Two Millenia by Constantine Cavarnos

This is a very interesting  and short book by the lettered Constantine Cavarnos. The book is a published lecture Cavarnos gave to the Community Center of the Church of Archangels in Watertown, Massachusetts in 1971. This lecture was also published in various Orthodox journals in Greece. The lecture explains the place of classical culture in the life of the Orthodox Church.

“This book is  distinguished by precision, conciseness, and the feeling of intellectual integrity in both thought and expression, virtues which are seldom encountered in books in our time….Arranging the subject matter very methodically, Cavarnos examines the generral  but precise relations between Orthodox Christianity and Greek Letters, and that every effort should be made to continue the  cultivation of Greek letters.”- P. Soterchos, Orthodox Press, Athens.

The following are the titles of the three chapters in this book.

Ch. 1- The Relation of Orthodoxy to Greek Letters

Ch. 2- The Value of Greek Letters after the Early Centuries of Christianity

Ch. 3- The value of Greek Letters for the Orthodox of Today

This book can be purchased at the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. The book is $6.95. You will have to scroll down the page to find the book.

Reading Homer in Byzantium

I have this lecture by Dr. Bryan Smith on CD and it is a very good overview a classical education in the Byzantine empire. Dr. Smith is headmaster of St. Peter’s Orthodox Classical School in Fort Worth, TX.

“I was just listening again to a talk by Dr. Bryan Smith called Reading Homer in Byzantium. In it, he outlines how the early Christians taught their students to write, how they selected their literature, and so on.

If you teach writing, reading, or anything that uses writing or reading, or if you are involved with the curriculum for your school, I would urge you to get your hands on this CD. It’s included as disk 23 in the 2007 set.

Bryan explains things like

• Why we have nine of Euripides plays instead of the 40 or more that he wrote
• How to practice writing using metaphrasis and paraphrasis (with some very amusing examples of pop music turned Shakespearean)
• Why we need to read less and slowly

Bryan is always insightful and relentlessly practical!”

Visit the CiRCE store to secure this CD or the entire 2007 set.

From the blog Quiddity.

Berkshares

I thought this was interesting.

“BerkShares are a local currency for the Berkshire region. Dubbed a “great economic experiment” by the New York Times, BerkShares are a tool for community empowerment, enabling merchants and consumers to plant the seeds for an alternative economic future for their communities. Launched in the fall of 2006, BerkShares had a robust initiation, with over one million BerkShares having been circulated in the first nine months and over two million to date. Currently, more than three hundred and sixty businesses have signed up to accept the currency. Five different banks have partnered with BerkShares, with a total of thirteen branch offices now serving as exchange stations. For BerkShares, this is only the beginning. Future plans could involve BerkShare checking accounts, electronic transfer of funds, ATM machines, and even a loan program to facilitate the creation of new, local businesses manufacturing more of the goods that are used locally.”- From Berkshares.org

A video about the Berkshares currency from the WSJ.

Tobacco and the Soul

“The current brouhaha over smoking has made everyone painfully aware of tobacco’s effects on the body, but it has also obscured a more profound reason for smoking’s popularity: its relation to the soul. As the heyday of smoking passes into the ashheap of history, it is meet that we reflect on this connection.

The soul, of course, is a complex thing. Long ago Plato suggested that we consider it as divided into three parts—the appetitive, spirited, and rational—that correspond to the three basic kinds of human desires: the desire to satisfy physical appetites, the desire for recognition, and the desire for truth. Once this tripartite division is recalled, tobacco’s relation to the soul becomes clear: the three prevalent types of smoking tobacco—cigarettes, cigars, and pipes—correspond to the three parts of the soul….

Finally, the pipe corresponds to the rational part of the soul, which explains why we tend to picture wise figures smoking pipes: the Oxford don surrounded by his great books, or Sherlock Holmes, who, in Doyle’s original stories, actually smoked other sorts of tobacco as well, yet is almost always portrayed with a pipe. Unlike cigars and cigarettes, a pipe endures. Similarly, the questions of the philosopher far outlast the passing concerns of physical desires on the one hand and human ambitions on the other. Further, while the cigar is entirely masculine, the pipe has both masculine and feminine elements (the stem and the bowl). This corresponds to the philosopher’s activity, which is both masculine and feminine: masculine in its pursuit of Lady Truth, feminine in its reception of anything that she discloses. Finally, the effect that the pipe has on others is analogous to the effect of philosophizing: the sweet fragrance of a pipe, like good philosophy, is a blessing to all who are near.”-Michael P. Foley

Read the entire article at First Things.

HT: Aaron Taylor

The Alabama Crimson Tide

New Nationwide Study Confirms Homeschool Academic Achievement

Ian Slatter
Director of Media Relations

August 10, 2009

Each year, the homeschool movement graduates at least 100,000 students. Due to the fact that both the United States government and homeschool advocates agree that homeschooling has been growing at around 7% per annum for the past decade, it is not surprising that homeschooling is gaining increased attention. Consequently, many people have been asking questions about homeschooling, usually with a focus on either the academic or social abilities of homeschool graduates.

As an organization advocating on behalf of homeschoolers, Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) long ago committed itself to demonstrating that homeschooling should be viewed as a mainstream educational alternative.

We strongly believe that homeschooling is a thriving education movement capable of producing millions of academically and socially able students who will have a tremendously positive effect on society.

Despite much resistance from outside the homeschool movement, whether from teachers unions, politicians, school administrators, judges, social service workers, or even family members, over the past few decades homeschoolers have slowly but surely won acceptance as a mainstream education alternative. This has been due in part to the commissioning of research which demonstrates the academic success of the average homeschooler.

The last piece of major research looking at homeschool academic achievement was completed in 1998 by Dr. Lawrence Rudner. Rudner, a professor at the ERIC Clearinghouse, which is part of the University of Maryland, surveyed over 20,000 homeschooled students. His study, titled Home Schooling Works, discovered that homeschoolers (on average) scored about 30 percentile points higher than the national average on standardized achievement tests.

This research and several other studies supporting the claims of homeschoolers have helped the homeschool cause tremendously. Today, you would be hard pressed to find an opponent of homeschooling who says that homeschoolers, on average, are poor academic achievers.

There is one problem, however. Rudner’s research was conducted over a decade ago. Without another look at the level of academic achievement among homeschooled students, critics could begin to say that research on homeschool achievement is outdated and no longer relevant.

Recognizing this problem, HSLDA commissioned Dr. Brian Ray, an internationally recognized scholar and president of the non-profit National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), to collect data for the 2007–08 academic year for a new study which would build upon 25 years of homeschool academic scholarship conducted by Ray himself, Rudner, and many others.

Drawing from 15 independent testing services, the Progress Report 2009: Homeschool Academic Achievement and Demographics included 11,739 homeschooled students from all 50 states who took three well-known tests—California Achievement Test, Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, and Stanford Achievement Test for the 2007–08 academic year. The Progress Report is the most comprehensive homeschool academic study ever completed.

The Results

Overall the study showed significant advances in homeschool academic achievement as well as revealing that issues such as student gender, parents’ education level, and family income had little bearing on the results of homeschooled students.

National Average Percentile Scores
Subtest	Homeschool	Public School
Reading	89	50
Language	84	50
Math	84	50
Science	86	50
Social Studies	84	50
Corea	88	50
Compositeb	86	50
a. Core is a combination of Reading, Language, and Math. b. Composite is a combination of all subtests that the student took on the test.

There was little difference between the results of homeschooled boys and girls on core scores.

Boys—87th percentile
Girls—88th percentile

Household income had little impact on the results of homeschooled students.

$34,999 or less—85th percentile
$35,000–$49,999—86th percentile
$50,000–$69,999—86th percentile
$70,000 or more—89th percentile

The education level of the parents made a noticeable difference, but the homeschooled children of non-college educated parents still scored in the 83rd percentile, which is well above the national average.

Neither parent has a college degree—83rd percentile
One parent has a college degree—86th percentile
Both parents have a college degree—90th percentile

Whether either parent was a certified teacher did not matter.

Certified (i.e., either parent ever certified)—87th percentile
Not certified (i.e., neither parent ever certified)—88th percentile

Parental spending on home education made little difference.

Spent $600 or more on the student—89th percentile
Spent under $600 on the student—86th percentile

The extent of government regulation on homeschoolers did not affect the results.

Low state regulation—87th percentile
Medium state regulation—88th percentile
High state regulation—87th percentile

HSLDA defines the extent of government regulation this way:

States with low regulation: No state requirement for parents to initiate any contact or State requires parental notification only.

States with moderate regulation: State requires parents to send notification, test scores, and/or professional evaluation of student progress.

State with high regulation: State requires parents to send notification or achievement test scores and/or professional evaluation, plus other requirements (e.g. curriculum approval by the state, teacher qualification of parents, or home visits by state officials).

The question HSLDA regularly puts before state legislatures is, “If government regulation does not improve the results of homeschoolers why is it necessary?”

In short, the results found in the new study are consistent with 25 years of research, which show that as a group homeschoolers consistently perform above average academically. The Progress Report also shows that, even as the numbers and diversity of homeschoolers have grown tremendously over the past 10 years, homeschoolers have actually increased the already sizeable gap in academic achievement between themselves and their public school counterparts-moving from about 30 percentile points higher in the Rudner study (1998) to 37 percentile points higher in the Progress Report (2009).

As mentioned earlier, the achievement gaps that are well-documented in public school between boys and girls, parents with lower incomes, and parents with lower levels of education are not found among homeschoolers. While it is not possible to draw a definitive conclusion, it does appear from all the existing research that homeschooling equalizes every student upwards. Homeschoolers are actually achieving every day what the public schools claim are their goals—to narrow achievement gaps and to educate each child to a high level.

Of course, an education movement which consistently shows that children can be educated to a standard significantly above the average public school student at a fraction of the cost—the average spent by participants in the Progress Report was about $500 per child per year as opposed to the public school average of nearly $10,000 per child per year—will inevitably draw attention from the K-12 public education industry.

Answering the Critics

This particular study is the most comprehensive ever undertaken. It attempts to build upon and improve on the previous research. One criticism of the Rudner study was that it only drew students from one large testing service. Although there was no reason to believe that homeschoolers participating with that service were automatically non-representative of the broader homeschool community, HSLDA decided to answer this criticism by using 15 independent testing services for this new study. There can be no doubt that homeschoolers from all walks of life and backgrounds participated in the Progress Report.

While it is true that not every homeschooler in America was part of this study, it is also true that the Progress Report provides clear evidence of the success of homeschool programs.

The reason is that all social science studies are based on samples. The goal is to make the sample as representative as possible because then more confident conclusions can be drawn about the larger population. Those conclusions are then validated when other studies find the same or similar results.

Critics tend to focus on this narrow point and maintain that they will not be satisfied until every homeschooler is submitted to a test. This is not a reasonable request because not all homeschoolers take standardized achievement tests. In fact, while the majority of homeschool parents do indeed test their children simply to track their progress and also to provide them with the experience of test-taking, it is far from a comprehensive and universal practice among homeschoolers.

The best researchers can do is provide a sample of homeschooling families and compare the results of their children to those of public school students, in order to give the most accurate picture of how homeschoolers in general are faring academically.

The concern that the only families who chose to participate are the most successful homeschoolers can be alleviated by the fact that the overwhelming majority of parents did not know their children’s test results before agreeing to participate in the study.

HSLDA believes that this study along with the several that have been done in the past are clear evidence that homeschoolers are succeeding academically.

Final Thought

Homeschooling is making great strides and hundreds of thousands of parents across America are showing every day what can be achieved when parents exercise their right to homeschool and make tremendous sacrifices to provide their children with the best education available.- From HSLDA