Daily Office: Tuesday
Morning
¶ Marble: What I’d really like is a cast-marble copy (whatever “cast marble” is) of Houdon’s Louvre bust of Voltaire — the one with the perruque. The new Scully bookshelf, with its rows of Library of America spines, seems to demand a completing cliché. But the one Web site that seems aware of a decent copy no longer offers it.
Meanwhile, I came across this site. which I would rename Glad I Don’t.
Noon
¶ A Little Learning: Hand-wringing in the UK about making school easy for kids.
Night
¶ Harris Pat: Spooky! Fossil Darling, on the phone with me but talking to LXIV as he often does, said to his companion, “I’ve always been true to you in my fashion.” About two beats later, I heard LXIV reciting the same Cole Porter lyrics that were coming out of my mouth:
Oremus…
Morning, cont’d
§ Marble. It’s the prices that are breathtaking. I suppose that these objects must really be carved marble, in which case, considering the labor, they may actually be bon marché. Alas, they are also hideous. I look more like the Voltaire bust than Voltaire did; it’s hard to believe that the sculptor, however industrious, had any acquaintance with the philosopher’s phiz. And the wig!
Noon, cont’d
§ Little Learning. It’s the usual sort of thing:
“I believe strongly that academic standards are also improved by offering more ambitious and challenging lessons, rather than those that are merely ‘relevant’ and accessible.”
Who can quarrel with that? Wouldn’t it be nice if every student emerged from schooling fully equipped with the powers of critical thinking widely thought to be indispensable in healthy democracies? Of course it would be nice. But are schools the institutions to look to in this connection?
Schools are still for scholars: they best suit students with scholastic aptitudes. If we agree that that’s exactly what schools ought to do, that leaves us with the problem of passing the time for the greater number of kids who aren’t scholastically gifted. For them, school as we know it is a pointless bore, and I challenge anyone to deny it.
Critical thinking is essentially a scholarly tool, specifically developed by philologists for the interrogation of texts on the assumption that charters and other founding documents are likely to be false, which was the state of affairs in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, when critical thinking was first developed. It’s very difficult to imagine how the techniques of critical thinking are to be acquired outside the disciplines, all of them scholarly, that have come to depend upon it.
And yet something very like critical thinking is being mapped as we speak by cognitive scientists — who assume, again quite rightly, that unexamined mental reflections are likely to be false. The precepts of this uncommon-sense cousin of critical thinking could far more effectively and pleasantly be instilled at a lakeside summer camp than in a dreary overheated classroom.
Pushing everyone through an educational system that waters down genuinely scholarly standards and practices to “realistic” intensity serves no one. Does the prospect of bifurcating the system raise a specter of institutionalized class differences? If so, I’m glad that nobody’s afraid of that specter when it comes to medicine or engineering!
Night, cont’d
§ Harris Pat. “If a Harris pat means a Paris hat…” FD was so flabbergasted that he had to hang up.