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Archive for the ‘Classical Education’ Category

[This post is a follow-up to the question I posted today on Facebook about whether I should read the Harry Potter series.]

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Alright. Thanks all for your input today. I was not calling for divisiveness, but I knew that saying “Harry Potter” would bring you all out in full flourishes. You did great.

Just a couple thoughts and then an answer…

  • Yes, it is! The “magic” in Harry Potter is the same thing as the magic in Narnia and LotR. Accepting it in one and rejecting it in another is a problem.
  • You all don’t know many of each other and didn’t see that some of you were speaking tongue-in-cheek for part of the time at least.
  • I’ll be writing/speaking more on it in the next school year, but let us be really clear that the Bible has many, many objectionable elements in it, much more varied than Harry Potter. The Bible as a movie would be rated R in parts. The matter is how those elements are treated. Condemning a work because it contains something you don’t like isn’t just cause. The fact is that there must be conflict, there must be something that makes everything ugly and need redemption. That’s what makes a story good. Conflict/problem is what makes every story not a documentary/infomercial (and even documentary is enhanced by conflict).
  • If you’re struggling with people enjoying Harry Potter, I think that I Cor 8 should be your guide.
  • If you’re struggling with people being offended by Harry Potter, I think that I Cor. 8 should be your guide.
  • For meat!? For Harry Potter!? Are we willing to make mincemeat of the bonds of Christ? Don’t!

I don’t need to write a response, because one has already been gracefully and beautifully written. I read it last summer, and it helped swing me over to officially be willing to read/listen to the series (not sure I’m interested in the movies, but we’ll see if it’s convenient to watch them).

The fact is that “we turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are.” (Madeleine L’Engle).

The best position I’ve read on the matter was written by Andrew Peterson. He said in part,

Let me be clear: Harry Potter is NOT Jesus. This story isn’t inspired, at least not in the sense that Scripture is inspired; but because I believe that all truth is God’s truth, that the resurrection is at the heart of the Christian story, and the main character of the Christian story is Christ, because I believe in God the Father, almighty maker of heaven and earth and in Jesus Christ his only begotten son—and because I believe that he inhabits my heart and has adopted me as his son, into his family, his kingdom, his church—I have the freedom to rejoice in the Harry Potter story, because even there, Christ is King. Wherever we see beauty, light, truth, goodness, we see Christ. Do we think him so small that he couldn’t invade a series of books about a boy wizard? Do we think him cut off from a story like this, as if he were afraid, or weak, or worried? Remember when Santa Claus shows up (incongruously) in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? It’s a strange moment, but to my great surprise I’ve been moved by it. Lewis reminds me that even Father Christmas is subject to Jesus, just as in Prince Caspian the hosts of mythology are subject to him. The Harry Potter story is subject to him, too, and Jesus can use it however he wants. In my case, Jesus used it to help me long for heaven, to remind me of the invisible world, to keep my imagination active and young, and he used it to show me his holy bravery in his triumph over the grave.

The full article is called Harry Potter, Jesus and Me.” Please follow the link and go read it. Every word. It is seasoned with grace and addresses the wide array of problems that were brought up today. It will be an encouragement to the proponents, also.

Thanks for taking part.

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“The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables…Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade–not outside of it… The only Christian work is good work well done.

Dorothy Sayers

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To rear our kids to be learners and thinkers requires skills well-beyond information retrieval. We as moderns with our high-powered phones often feel well-educated because the facts we need are so close by; mere seconds of typing and waiting separate us from knowing all sorts of truths. I have more than once replied to an innocent fact-wondering family member or friend who asked a simple question, with a flick of my phone-filled wrist and a caustic,  ”Is my Google better than yours?” From the Chronicle of Higher Ed yesterday,

When it comes to the materials of learning, we should impress upon students the importance of carrying these materials around in their own heads.  Facts about the Civil War, scientific laws, poems by Emily Dickinson . . . these are not just items to retrieve when a situation calls for them.  They are rightly part of a youth’s character and sensibility.  The Gettysburg Address isn’t just a text on the syllabus to be invoked at test time.  The cadences and assertions should be internalized forever.

The danger of Google is that it’s so convenient that it turns the materials of history, science, literature, art, and politics into information, not learning.  In a Google-ized classroom, we lose the practice of education-as-formation.  And the more we let search engines function in student work, the less we can expect that students will remember our instruction once the semester ends. — Google Memory 

We have already left the abacus, the cubit, the slide rule and the butter churn behind. We have found efficiency in new things, and that’s ok. Today we have hard talk about what we must perhaps give up tomorrow (paper books, cursive, multiplication tables, spelling lists, fossil fuels!) and to educators, it hurts to say too much.

Technology is coming, and that’s ok.  But tech is replacing our knowledge-level, utilitarian hardware. It cannot replace our logic or rhetoric skills that make us more fully human, or at least give us the opportunity to do so. Technology is primarily efficient, not beautiful (though it be shiny).  Technology cannot instill virtuous childhood. A search engine cannot cultivate a child’s mind; it can only deliver the seeds.

A water wheel cannot grow crops, make bread or even grind wheat. It’s sole job was to receive product and deposit product. In so doing, it moved other parts. The water wheel did a great job doing what it was supposed to do. It was a great technological feat that saved lots of labor (though there were probably purists who continued to sell hand-threshed or oxen-ground wheat in the specialty stores). It came and went.

Our knowledge retrieval systems will come and go. 150 lb. encyclopedia sets came and now they are long gone. Google is here and will be replaced tomorrow with something better.

But let us not confuse these methods of retrieval with what they are not. They are not education, and an education that concerns itself primarily with facts and fact objectives and pounds towards its testing deadlines is missing the great bulk of what education truly is.

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My favorite book is getting a documentary, and I am excited. Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl is loved and hated and incredibly difficult to explain and understand.

Click here to give the book a $10 chance. It has interesting reviews on Amazon. Feel free to start with the 1 star ones.

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Well it starts with food and coffee…sort of.

Here is an article that centers that question on Moscow, Idaho…home of Douglas Wilson.

Evangelical vs Liberal: A Report from the Pacific Northwest

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This is one of the best Presidential addresses I have ever heard, and it’s stunning on several fronts. It’s worth hearing several times. Brilliant. Poetic. Historical. Consoling. Gritty. Heroic.

“The future doesn’t belong to the faint-hearted. It belongs to the brave.”

If you weren’t born when this happened, you should know that this event was a much bigger deal than shuttle launches are now. The publicity was heightened even for this one (I remember anticipating it for weeks) and it had even more attention because of Christa McAuliffe’s addition to the crew as the first teacher in space.

The speech was written that morning by Peggy Noonan.

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Ryan and Christie - Plimoth - April 2008

Yesterday we, along with some JECA and FB families, enjoyed a 1/2 hour online, field trip to Plimoth Plantation. I’ve been around the block a few times, and Plimoth is one of my favorite places in the world. It’s the beginning of probably my favorite fragment of history (1600-1800), and my four trips to the village are very pleasant memories.

The moderator did a very good job, and I especially appreciated the two Pilgrim interpreters (one was a young girl). He even did a little pull on them with the comments about football and the airplane, and they plied their craft masterfully.

Anyway, I appreciate Scholastic for hosting the event, and, though I don’t know how long it will remain, you can watch a replay of the event here: Plimoth Plantation Virtual Field Trip.

Afterwards, you can go here to learn more about the special place. Visit the online shop, too, to find some very creative gift ideas. I especially love the reproductions, which they make on site (right now I’m drinking sweet tea out of my three-handled tyg). Enjoy: Plimoth Plantation Website.

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Super-Neato Video

It’s telling that if had I entitled this post, “Changing Education Paradigms” then you would have tuned it out already. It’s also telling that this video would have had almost no play online if it had been the audio version only and not the creatively animated creature that it is.

This video is outstanding, and it could be useful to shaking up the modern norms that need shaking up. I intend to watch it a few more times before I really start commenting on it. I wouldn’t say that I agree wholly with him, but my reasons probably aren’t why the public school crowd will hate this. I’ve already committed to a good number of these changes. The public and common, private sectors have face this issue with a whole lot of momentum going in the wrong direction.

What are your thoughts?

 

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I have very little exposure to Monty Python (this maybe doubles it). This is a good take on exposing bad reasoning skills.

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“…it has become abundantly clear in the second half of the twentieth century that Western Man has decided to abolish himself. Having wearied of the struggle to be himself,he has created his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, his own vulnerability out of his own strength; himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down, and, in a process of auto-genocide, convincing himself that he is too numerous, and labouring accordingly with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer in order to be an easier prey for his enemies; until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over a weary, battered old brontosaurus and becomes extinct.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith (p. 16)

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JECA is the antidote.

 

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Peter Drucker gives good insight…

Management is deeply involved in moral concerns—the nature of man, good and evil. Management is thus what tradition used to call a liberal art. Managers draw on all the knowledge and insights of the humanities and the social sciences—on psychology and philosophy, on economics and history, on ethics—as well as on the physical sciences. But they have to focus this knowledge on effectiveness and results—on healing a sick patient, teaching a student, building a bridge, designing and selling a user friendly software program. For these reasons, management will increasingly be the discipline and the practice through which the humanities will again acquire recognition, impact, and relevance.

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A boy raised on great literature is more likely to grow up to think, to speak, and to write like a civilized man.

Tom Spence wrote a great editorial for last Friday’s Wall Street Journal, “How to Raise Boys Who Read.” It’s worth the read if you know any kids. Boys are way behind girls on reading habits, and I don’t know that I would even be satisfied with girls’ reading habits.

The publishing companies have started throwing the paper version of “shock and awe” at our boys with unconscionably, base content. Instead of trying to sell books by the true, good and beautiful path; they are following the private-things-made-open route. Proverbs says that, “Folly is joy to him that is destitute of wisdom; but a man of understanding walks uprightly.”

One obvious problem with the SweetFarts philosophy of education [read the linked article for more info] is that it is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals. If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn’t go very far.

The little boy in this picture belongs to me. He would love these base books. He and his other three brothers could sit and laugh and scorn and chortle with them all day long. It would make him very happy.

But if I have received a commission to parent him, if I am going to be held accountable for how I do it, if I believe Proverbs, if all this important speak in Scripture is true that children are a heritage unto the Lord, then I must not allow him to revel in these things or allow them to shape his thinking. I must not let him to be saturated in it, because he would be all-in, and the desire for perverseness would roll bigger and bigger.

There is so much truth, goodness and beauty to revel in. There are so many heroic stories he must learn, so many brave hearts that he must meet, so many honors that must captivate his mind. I must put the best before him.

Sweet Farts is admittedly getting too much attention here, even in this post. It’s on the cusp. But there are plenty of other low-level books our culture is reading and loving.

(Now go read the article at the link above.)

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If you always go where you have always have gone and always do what you have always done, you will always be what you have always been.

– Tristan Gylberd

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Source

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This is a beautiful idea that George Grant covers. The whole video is good, but the specific idea of import starts at 3:15 and goes through the 4-minute mark.

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When I read church history and read the biographies of great Christians I see how common it is for godly men to disagree on issues even as fundamental as predestination and free will. Having a perspective on these issues that is two thousand years wide is much more valuable than having a perspective that spans only a few years or a handful of books. Even when dealing with difficult issues, it is important that we display the kind of humility that Wesley forsook. We need to understand that greater Christians than ourselves wrestled with these issues and often came to differing conclusions, whether the topic is the doctrines of grace, the end times, the meaning and mode of baptism, and so on. We are so blinded by our sin and our corrupted powers of reasoning that we will never know the truth exhaustively. Studying the history of the church helps keep us grounded, showing that there is bound to be disagreement and hopefully showing how we can work together for the sake of Christ and his gospel despite such disagreement.

This is most of the concluding paragraph in a posting you should read entirely.

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The first-graders needed to see this video this morning to see what it must have looked like in Pa Ingall’s parents’ house that night of the dance (from Little House in the Big Woods) as Pa was calling out figures from the fiddle.

I appreciate the video being available so I didn’t need to try to describe this.

At least I didn’t show them this. That would have ruined them.

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Mark Twain thought so…

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Innocents Abroad

So did C.S. Lewis. He called our snootiness about our own way “provincial snobbery.”

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I’m new to this controversy, but was Shakespeare Shakespeare?

George Grant says no, in his Christian Almanac: A Book Of Days Celebrating History’s Most Significant People & Events. Today is the Shakespear’s/Shakspar’s birthday and Grant says,

Three is no evidence that Shakspar was ever actually literate–there are no extant manuscripts of his writing and the only evidence we have of his hand are two barely legible “X-marks-the-spot” signatures. He had no formal education, owned no books, never traveled abroad as far as we know, and never claimed authorship of the works attributed to him. His parents were illiterate, his wife was illiterate, and his children were illiterate–hardly what you might expect from the undisputed “single greatest author of English prose.”

The same was poted today on his blog. Read it here on Grantian Florilegium.

If you wish to delve in further, let me know how it goes in the pool of controversy.

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Here’s a 100 question vocabulary quiz for your betterment. I got a 63%, primarily because I am a good guesser.

I don’t know if something wasn’t working, but I ended up grading it myself because I couldn’t see a way that they did it for me.

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A few weeks ago, I met a couple of guys who I ended up talking to about technology and education and the fusion/non-fusion of them. Well, my ideas are pretty backward and perhaps we should discuss them sometime, but they ended up mulling it over and then told a mutual friend that they had talked to me. They suggested that perhaps they could pull me out of the Dark Ages into reality by getting an iPhone into my hand.

The friend stated for them plainly, that I own an iPhone [2 years, 2 months and about 27 wonderful days] and he called me one of the most “connected” people he knows. I would have loved to have been part of the conversation.

Anyway, I think I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been online almost constantly since 1998. BUT…I did appreciate some of the comments those guys gave me and will continue to mull them over as they pertain to my aversion to computers in education (so-to-speak). I accept this tiny, little, electo-metallic boxy thing that I carry in my pocket as a gift from God. I use it to communicate (email/text), build community and share updates and pictures with family (Facebook), to entertain myself (MLB App), to bank, to worship (Bible/iTunes), to navigate/map, to take and edit pictures/video, to shop (Amazon), to read news, to be my watch, to refer/learn (Dictionary, Wikipedia), to wake me up in the morning and tell me the time during the night, to know what is on the schedule (CalenGoo), to read news/weather, to rent movies, to watch live baseball games, to take notes, to find restaurants and dozens and dozens of other things on a more irregular basis. That’s actually all the same stuff I used to do before I got my iPhone. Now I just use my PC less and my TV a lot less. (The weirdest app I have is one where I can sort of take a “walking” tour of the Louvre.) My kids use my phone to play games.

Convenient and helpful as it is, it can be a crutch. It can be a distraction. And it’s an inner war I face to turn to the little screen for a diversion instead talking to the persons near me, especially people near me.

For instance, for six months or so I have been using my iPhone as a Bible reader during Sunday School. I like it. I can take notes on it and can turn between chapters faster than those with a Bible. It’s easy to read and easy to use, but the temptation to research my dissertation or baseball stats or shop for books is present.

For instance two, comparing the horsepower between vehicles, better grass-seeding tactics or listening to the police scanner in Dubque are not acceptable activities when I ought to be talking with Christie, feeding Bear, instructing my children in righteousness, or just laughing at their jokes.

There are further dangers that stem from believing what only seems to be true that Google and Wikipedia have all the answers–or at least they’re gaining ground.The fact is, “the world is too much with us, late and soon” (Wordsworth). There have always been these same struggles.

Further, I am a Gospel-bound supernaturalist. I believe that the things of this world are not real, in that, they won’t last, they will fade, they cannot come with me to eternity. My credo confirms that “it is not death to die.” And so I must live like I believe that the things of the world belong ultimately to the rubbish heap. And that includes iPhones (I’ve already spent through one) and the things thereon.

But still we are allowed to enjoy the blessings and graces and pleasures that God permits. Video rentals and White House press briefings are not off-limits to Christians just because some of them are foul. Some people are going bonkers for the iPad, but I can’t imagine holding a conversation with that thing pressed to my ear.

There will always be abuses. Grown men and women will forsake sleep so they can play video games through the night. Television sets carry deep immorality and irreverence to all homes. Calendars, journals, restaurants and baseball can all be abused, too.

I really, really try not to be an iPhone snob. I really do. I almost always try not to even refer to it. My little bit of playfulness about its superiority is 99% play and tease. The phone doesn’t need me to sell it. Last night, in a heroic act of deference, I sent Christie to the store with my phone and took no phone to run my two-hour work errand with three of the boys. I didn’t even miss it…though I did wish I had an old-fashioned watch.

[I'm taking a breath right here, surveying the broad swath of mess I just made and haven't yet addressed the title of the post...and now going on.]

So—to be abrupt and to throw in a non-sequitur just for kicks—what I really started out to say here in this post is that someone lost their new, prototype, camouflaged iPhone. It fell in the “right” hands so we could revel in it’s niceness. Read about it below.

This is Apple’s Next iPhone

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Peter Baur is a model spokesman for classical ed. Here he is featured in a a Memphis Daily News article talking about the model and the school he helps, Westminster Academy.

Baur Takes Passionate Approach to Education

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Douglas Wilson has some, very useful tips for writers, beginning with:

1. Know something about the world, and by this I mean the world outside of books. This might require joining the Marines, or working on an oil rig, or as a hashslinger at a truck stop in Kentucky. Know what things smell like out there.

Here are the rest: Seven Basic and Brief Pointers for Writers

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As a child C. S. Lewis attended a number of schools (which he hated), but in 1914 he moved to Bookham at Surrey to study privately with his father’s former tutor, William T. Kirkpatrick. Lewis homeschooled under Kirkpatrick for the next two years before receiving a scholarship to Oxford in December of 1916. In a letter dated October 12, 1915, Lewis described his typical day of schooling to a friend. (Lewis was 16 years old at the time, soon to turn 17.)

Typical Schedule:

  • Breakfast and a short walk
  • Thucydides and Homer
  • 15-minute break
  • Tacitus
  • Lunch at 1:00

Read the rest here at Ray Fowler’s site.

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Doug and Nate Wilson tag team to free you from the stifled consternation that binds your conscience. Be free! Really good stuff.

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Brain Bent Toward God

Isaac Newton by Mitch Stokes (along with biographies of Jane Austen, Saint Patrick and John Bunyan and Winston Churchill) is part of a new Christian Encounters series released by Thomas Nelson on 3/2/10. About five more titles will be added in August, and I impressed with the affordable price that was affixed to them. About these important people, the publisher writes, “We are now living in a world they created and understand both it and ourselves better in the light of their lives.”

Alexander Pope wrote an epitaph that was carved above the fireplace of the room in which Newton was born. It reads,

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;

God said, “Let Newton be,” and all was light.

Truly, Newton was an epic force in changing the way the world thought about a wide swath of subjects. Truths that we now carry as assumptions and consider almost innate knowledge, were first elucidated by Newton in the 1600s and early 1700s. At the same time, Newton was foremost a godward man. The common view of the day was that science and philosophy were meant to better man and his condition. “Newton believed that all knowledge–including knowledge of nature–was, in the end, knowledge of God. Knowing was worship.” And this permeated everything.

I do not have a deep background in science or mathematics, and those who don’t may struggle with portions of this book that describe the content and depth of Newton’s drive and study. But I do understand the fundamental and original nature of ideas that he laid out, despite obstacles and naysayers.

This book is a quality summary of Newton’s life, and I appreciate owning it.

(This particular copy had some differing depths of inkprint, which was a little annoying and hard on the eyes.)

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Here is Nate Wilson sitting in the Random House Author Spotlight. It’s a very good chunk of paragraphs you should read.

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The truth of this poem has already maybe prevented you from being interested in actually reading it. You’ll love this poem if you will take the time to read it.

Television

by Roald Dahl

The most important thing we’ve learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set –
Or better still, just don’t install
The idiotic thing at all.
In almost every house we’ve been,
We’ve watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
(Last week in someone’s place we saw
A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)
They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they’re hypnotised by it,
Until they’re absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
Oh yes, we know it keeps them still,
They don’t climb out the window sill,
They never fight or kick or punch,
They leave you free to cook the lunch
And wash the dishes in the sink –
But did you ever stop to think,
To wonder just exactly what
This does to your beloved tot?
IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK — HE ONLY SEES!
‘All right!’ you’ll cry. ‘All right!’ you’ll say,
‘But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!’
We’ll answer this by asking you,
‘What used the darling ones to do?
‘How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?’
Have you forgotten? Don’t you know?
We’ll say it very loud and slow:
THEY … USED … TO … READ! They’d READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!
The nursery shelves held books galore!
Books cluttered up the nursery floor!
And in the bedroom, by the bed,
More books were waiting to be read!
Such wondrous, fine, fantastic tales
Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales
And treasure isles, and distant shores
Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars,
And pirates wearing purple pants,
And sailing ships and elephants,
And cannibals crouching ’round the pot,
Stirring away at something hot.
(It smells so good, what can it be?
Good gracious, it’s Penelope.)
The younger ones had Beatrix Potter
With Mr. Tod, the dirty rotter,
And Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland,
And Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and-
Just How The Camel Got His Hump,
And How the Monkey Lost His Rump,
And Mr. Toad, and bless my soul,
There’s Mr. Rate and Mr. Mole-
Oh, books, what books they used to know,
Those children living long ago!
So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books,
Ignoring all the dirty looks,
The screams and yells, the bites and kicks,
And children hitting you with sticks-
Fear not, because we promise you
That, in about a week or two
Of having nothing else to do,
They’ll now begin to feel the need
Of having something to read.
And once they start — oh boy, oh boy!
You watch the slowly growing joy
That fills their hearts. They’ll grow so keen
They’ll wonder what they’d ever seen
In that ridiculous machine,
That nauseating, foul, unclean,
Repulsive television screen!
And later, each and every kid
Will love you more for what you did.

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