I was listening to an interview with Democratic Rep John Conyers where he said these words (and I will quote them exactly)

… the public option’s only available, which is the only way you’ll manage costs and give some competition to thirteen hundred other health insurance companies, the only way he could have gotten that through is that progressives held their nose and voted for the plan anyway.

I included the last portion only to show you how clever the progressives are in that they try very hard to keep the Progressive political label separate from the Progressive educational label, even though both are born of an interesting merger of Messianism and Darwinism at the end of the 19th century. In other words, our schools are supported by the state that needs them.

But what I really want you to notice is his truly extraordinary statement about competition. There are, he tells us, 1300 insurance companies.

But they don’t have any competition.

The only way they can have any competition is if there is a state agency that oversees a 1301’st insurance option.

Rep. Conyers is a very smart man and had to know what he was saying. Either, therefore, he is brazenly dishonest, which I don’t have reason to believe, or he is thinking within a paradigm that prevents him from seeing the most blatantly obvious facts.

If 1300 insurance companies are not competing with each other, and that is possible, then there is already too much of a public option involved. What I mean is that in any market, if you have 1300 companies sharing the market and not competing with each other, it is because the government has already divided the market up into the shares each company gets.

Now, to increase competition, he says, Rep Conyers wants to introduce a force that has no fiscal responsibility, no need to make a profit, and no reputation for running things well anywhere else.

We are watching the dominoes fall on what I have called “the catastrophic continuum.”

A long time ago, we decided to socialize large portions of our economy. Many people benefited from this process, especially the very poor or the leaders of the largest companies.

But a force was put in motion that, in my opinion, guarantees the end of free society.

Put simply, when the wrong level of government identifies a problem that others (citizens or politicians) ought to be solving, it never passes up the opportunity to seize power.

It displaces those who are responsible to fulfill the duty in the first place. Those displaced are delighted, even convincing themselves that they are free.

But the solutions offered by the state inevitably, as a matter of scale, create even more problems than they initially tried to deal with.

But they control reporting and accounting, so they can, as we say, cook the books.

So when the seven problems that replace the one problem are realized by their victims, they feel helpless and call out to the only power big enough to come to their aid: the state.

And the generous and kind-hearted state, funded by the generous and kind-hearted (though increasingly irresponsible) citizens, multiplies the seven problems by another seven, each crippling one set of citizens by usurping their duties and another by putting them under its matriarchal control.

Look at Social Security, welfare, the VA hospitals, public education, Medicare, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (during their state owned eras), etc. etc.

As the state expands, people are left with an increasingly empty sense that they don’t influence their own lives very much, so they’re going to go ahead and make a difference.

So they get into politics.

Our state is what it is today because the American people are fundamentally irresponsible. That may expalin why any politician who calls for responsibility is so dreadfully feared by the Progressives who control the media and the state and the schools.

It’s been a deep week in politics. I wish I had time to gather my thoughts more tightly together. I love government. I love my country. I just wish each would mind their own business instead of imposing their insecurities on others in the guise of ideologies.

We were, until about a year ago, the wealthiest society in the history of the world, or so I kept hearing. I question that.

I am trying to imagine a childhood more impoverished than one without fairy tales.

Look at it this way: education is the

• training of the intellect
• passing on of a tradition
• formation of the soul
• preparation for the “real world”

But our modern mindset has destroyed the imagination, which is 1000 times more important than anything else a school can cultivate.

While I know you are all desperately waiting the posting of pictures and tales from my trip out west (a “business cruise” with Andrew Pudewa’s organization), I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait for a day or two to see them.

I only have a moment and you don’t want to hear all the explanations about computers burning out and getting purchased and being adjusted to and all that rot. You just want to hear this:

CS Lewis introduced  a theme in The Pilgrim’s Regress that he developed continually throughout his writings, in particular, perhaps in The Abolition of Man.

I’m referring to his recognition that the modern and now the post-modern delights in “seeing through things.”

That part is recognized by almost everybody now, and the Beatles made a living off the motif after Sergeant Pepper, at the latest.

Pause.

They had a song on their Revolver album, I believe, entitled, I’m Looking Through You so it was even before Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.

But what Lewis saw was that, if you see through everything there is nothing left to look at.

You end up asking questions like Stanley Fish’s, “Is there a text in the classroom?” or writing essays like Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation.

Indeed, texts do disappear when you only look through them and interpretation becomes impossible when you stop noticing the forms of what you are looking at.

For these reasons I appreciate a phrase I saw a few minutes ago, though I no longer remember where. What I saw was, “the beauty of grammar.”

I don’t think most people think grammar is beautiful. Then again, they don’t think geometry is beautiful either. All that means is that they don’t have eyes to see.

The beauty of grammar is a formal and a calm beauty. I would go further and suggest that it is a hidden beauty.

Grammar is the skeleton of our language, but skeletons aren’t generally considered beautiful. If we want to hold to that metaphor, then let’s say that grammar is what makes the beauty of language possible.

The soul does not like confusion and disorder. Grammar removes them. It takes wild and whirling words and orders them, not arbitrarily but with deep meaning and purpose. It breathes respect for the auditor and ancestor into the sentence, and so exalts the speaker who humbles himself before her.

She makes human society possible and delightful. She weaves hearts together, even when they disagree.

Honestly, it is heartbreaking to see how she is despised and neglected in our day.

People want to see through every text and every statement, and not knowing grammar makes it a lot easier to do so. But the Beatle’s lyric comes back with a bit of a haunting conclusion:

I’m looking through you…

Where did you go?

In general, three approaches have dominated education from the beginning of time and I’m not sure there can be any more that are not combinations, parts, or permutations of these three.

The sophist does not believe in a knowable universe, so he focuses on adapting to change. The modern version of this approach is progressivism.

The traditionalist believes that knowledge is embodied in a tradition, so he focuses on absorbing and perpetuating that tradition. Many variations of this approach are followed in contemporary schools, but the best of the traditional theorists is probably ED Hirsch with his Core Knowledge approach.

The classicist believes in a knowable world in which knowledge is perception and relationship.

Individual Christians hold to any of these views, though Christianity is obviously a tradition in that its truths reside, not in the discoveries of the student, but in the wisdom of the fathers.

I find that Christian teachers trained in conventional colleges are strongly influenced by Progressive approaches, which discourage, by their nature, philosophical reflection on what you are doing.

For the most part, accepting these Progressive approaches without reflection undercuts the work and claims of the Christian school.

I don’t believe any of these approaches aligns with the teachings of scripture at a high level except for the classical approach.

At the root of the classical approach is a commitment to the belief that things have a nature and that we can know them according to their natures and treat them in ways fitting to their natures.

In addition, things have a purpose, and love enables its object to fulfill both its purpose and its nature.

In the classical tradition, the object of a science is to know the nature of a thing. The object of an art is to refine one’s ability to know the nature of things.

The sophist or Progressive educator does not believe we can know anything.

The traditionalist believes that we can know only through the tradition.

The classicist believes that we can perceive the nature of things and relate to them according to their natures.

What does your teaching lead your students to? That will tell you which of these theories you hold.

The

Now available as part of our Further Up & Further In fund raising campaign is part I of Dr. Vigen Guroian’s wonderful book Rallying The Really Human Things.

This fascinating first section is called “The Three Voices of Christian Humanism” and examines the work of GK Chesterton, Flannery O’Connor, and Russell Kirk.

The PDF version of this book can be yours for whatever price you feel it’s worth. As part of our campaign it – and several other downloads – are yours when you make a donation to CiRCE of any amount. Yes, it can be yours for just $1.00.

Click here to donate and download now.

Here is some more information on the book:

General Description:

For Vigen Guroian, contemporary culture is distinguished by its relentless assault on the moral imagination. In the stories it tells us, in the way it has degraded courtship and sexualized our institutions of higher education, in the ever-more-radical doctrines of human rights it propounds, and in the way it threatens to remake human nature via biotechnology, contemporary culture conspires to deprive men and women of the kind of imagination that Edmund Burke claimed allowed us to raise our perception of our own human dignity, or to “cover the defects of our own naked shivering nature.”

In Rallying the Really Human Things, Guroian combines a theologian’s keen sensitivity to the things of the spirit with his immersion in the works of Burke, Russell Kirk, G. K. Chesterton, Flannery O’Connor, St. John Chrysostom, and other exemplars of the religious humanist tradition to diagnose our cultural crisis. But he also points the way towards a culture more solicitous of the “really human things,” the Chesterton phrase from which he takes his title. Guroian’s wide-ranging analysis of these times provides a fresh and inimitable perspective on the practices and mores of contemporary life.

About the Author:
Vigen Guroian is Professor of Theology at Loyola College in Maryland. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Ethics after Christendom: Toward an Ecclesial Christian Ethic and Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Imagination.

What’s Being Said:

“In this eloquent and substantive book, Guroian uses the light of the past to point the way to a more human and civilized future.”
— Michael Medved, radio host and author of Right Turns

“Guroian is a rare and precious bird these days: a scholar of the Real. Here he focuses his moral passion and theologian’s mind on some of today’s most smoldering issues.”
— Kevin Ryan, Professor Emeritus, Boston University

“Vigen Gurorian’s courageous and discerning vision illuminates both current issues of burning importance (campus promiscuity, nationalism, and gay marriage, for example), and major Christian thinkers of the recent past (Chesterton, O’Connor, and Kirk). This compendium is a resource that will help us all see more clearly.”
— Frederica Mathewes-Green, columnist for Beliefnet.com and author of The Illumined Heart: The Ancient Christian Path of Transformation

“These eloquent and wide-ranging essays in the moral imagination establish Vigen Guroian as our own Chesterton. For with fine Chestertonian wit, he demonstrates that the modern West is not heinously wicked so much as it is wildly virtuous, as the old Christian virtues, uprooted from their native theological soil, continue to produce mad sprouts. Responding astringently to the cultural and religious vexations of our age, Guroian restores these saving virtues to the deep loam of Christian tradition.”
— Ralph Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature, Baylor University

“Rallying the Really Human Things does not so much inform as remind. Vigen Guroian has busied himself with one of the most pressing tasks in our intellectual life, which is to rescue the dignified word “humanism” from the damage wrought upon it by both the secularly self-sufficient and the piously ignorant.”
— Tracy Lee Simmons, author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin

“Professor Guroian’s book is both a powerful and provocative defense of traditional Christian humanism in its conflict with secularism.”
— Bob Cheeks, intellectualconservative.com

“Of course, this review hasn’t even mentioned excellent essays on ‘gay marriage’ and why businessmen ’should read great literture.’ There are myriad positions in his pages I would like to sound with trumpets on one hand and anathematize on the other. Like Chesterton, Guroian can write infuriating passages, but never dull ones.”
— David Paul Deavel, Gilbert Magazine

The english word epistemology seems like a technical word because it doesn’t come from the Anglo-Saxon or French and because it has taken on a rather precise meaning.

As a result, the word can intimidate the reader.

It doesn’t need to. It just means “what is knowable” or maybe “a set of beliefs or theories about knowledge.”

You can imagine that what you believe about knowledge would matter when you teach or build a curriculum.

What can we know? How do we come to know it? What does it mean to know? How is what we can know in one area related to what we can know in another area?

Your answers to these questions are your curriculum, so those answers matter.

So let’s take a moment and start to think about them.If we don’t, we’ll find ourselves teaching materials and in ways that we don’t understand and may not even agree with.

I would like to propose up front that we can find three broad theories of knowledge more or less commonly followed today and pursued through history.

For convenience, I will call them

1. The Christian and classical view of knowledge
2. The traditional view of knowledge
3. The Pragmatic view of knowledge

The pragmatic view is the one people follow most closely in our day when they are consciously following a theory. It’s greatest champions have been men like Francis Bacon (knowledge is power), William James, John Dewey, and Machiavelli.

In the pragmatic view, knowledge is the ability to do something, especially to adapt to and exercise power over the environment. Dewey and James are the most explicit theorists, and Dewey’s pragmatic theories dominate contemporary education, even in Christian schools.

Pragmatists are skills focused and they want children to construct their own realities. They tend to undercut traditions other than their own, seeing them as constraining and even oppressive.

In the old fashioned sense of the word, knowledge is impossible because there is nothing to known in that old fashioned sense and there is nothing that can know it anyway.

In other words, the world and everything in it is constantly changing, so there is no permanent “idea” or essence of a thing that you can know. You can just “know” what it is like now and adapt accordingly. This ability to adapt is knowledge.

In the traditionalist view, knowledge is the retention and reproduction of symbols. That sounds a little silly at first, so let me explain what I mean. Every tradition contains practices, rituals, artifacts, and texts (written or spoken) that embody that tradition.

When a member of a tradition wants to pass on that tradition (tradition literally means “to hand on,” from the Latin traduo), he teaches his students the practices, rituals, artifacts, and texts (which is what I mean by symbols) of that tradition.

Sports are relentlessly traditional because you become great, not by developing radically new techniques, but by imitating and then transcending those who were great before you. The very few exceptions (e.g. the Fosbury flop) only prove the rule.

The best reason for handing on a tradition is that a tradition embodies the wisdom of its members, especially those who came before.

When handled properly, the traditional symbols lead the recipient to the wisdom contained in or, better yet, pointed to by, the symbols.

When a school requires students to memorize poetry, repeat gestures, sing songs, learn the forms of grammar and literature, read old books, and otherwise remember and recite facts and information, it is acting traditionally.

A community embodies its soul in its traditions, so no community that is opposed to tradition can survive.

The great traditional educator of the contemporary world is ED Hirsch, with his Core Knowledge sequence.

You have succeeded as a student in a traditional school when you have demonstrated mastery of the content and symbols of the tradition.

The trouble with tradition arises from two possible sources. It may be that the ideas embodied in the symbols are false. In that case, the tradition may hold a community together, but it may do so by leading the whole community into error.

Or it may be that the members of the community look to the symbols and their preservation rather than the ideas and realities embodied in the symbols of the tradition.

Only a master of the symbols can transcend them. The clearest example of this fact seems to be our Lord and his response to the Pharisees. He recognized that they were, in varying degrees, living off the traditions instead of living by them.

As a result, they began to contort the traditions handed to them to their own advantage and became wolves among sheep.

In our Phariseeism, we can forget how very easily we become pharisees.

But long before the Pharisees began to contort the traditions, they had come to see the traditions either as ends in themselves, or, worse, as means to other ends than what they pointed to.

The Sabbath, for example, was a tradition handed to the Jewish people through their covenant with God. It was meant to be a Holy Day of rest. As such, it pointed the covenant people to something beyond a one day/week religious experience.

Symbols, in other words, don’t refer to themselves. This is easiest to see when we look at words. The word “lamp” is a sound symbol. It does not refer to itself, but to an invention with which we are all familiar that can enlighten a room.

There is a reality beyond the symbols.

In the Christian classical view of knowledge, the goal of learning is to perceive that reality.

We hand on and love and honor our traditions, not so people will know them, but so they will know what they refer to.

Of course, you usually can’t know what they refer to without knowing them because the reason you need symbols is precisely because it takes great wisdom to come to know the realities in the first place.

Here’s one way it could happen. A wise person comes to understand something about life. He wants his children to understand it to. They can’t, because they are young. So he makes up a fable. That fable becomes part of the tradition.

If the child actually contemplates the fable, he can move more rapidly to the insight of his wise father than his father was able to himself.

To the Christian and/or classical educator, it has always been necessary, but it has never been enough, to know the greatest symbols (in the sense I used the word above) of the tradition.

The goal is always to see what the symbols point to.

Knowledge, therefore, to the Christian classical educator is perception of reality.

The pragmatic educator is not content to “know” in this sense, because he does not believe such knowledge exists. He focuses on skills of adaptation.

The traditional educator at his best strives for this kind of knowledge, but he encounters so many temptations (especially honor from men who don’t see the reality beyond the tradition) that he rarely transcends the tradition.

And if he does, he’ll say something a little off kilter and offend the traditionalists around him, who will scapegoat or crucify him one way or another.

The Christian classical educator loves practical applications of his knowledge. But not as much as he loves the knowledge itself. Truth is the delight of his soul, the queen of his mind.

He does not demand of her that she step down and serve him.

The Christian classical educator loves the traditions on which he was raised. But not as much as he loves the truth and beauty embodied by that tradition.

The Christian classical educator takes the knowledge of the traditional educator and the skills of the Pragmatic educator and, guided by the good, weaves them into a beautiful tapestry of truth that nourishes the soul until the disciple has attained wisdom and virtue himself.

But only because he has come to see that knowledge is not mere power, nor is it mere recall of symbols and facts, but it is the perception and apprehension of reality itself.

Until we accept that we are not a civilized people, and that it matters, we have little hope of becoming one.

Francis Bacon said “Knowledge is power,” and I know of no record of him ever apologizing.

What sort of disposition would lead a person to saying such a thing. It’s not as if people prior to Bacon did not realize that knowledge gave its possessor power. But they had good manners and higher values, so they didn’t come right out and say it.

But Bacon did.

Worse still, people embraced this statement.

When Francis Bacon said “Knowledge is power,” he introduced a scientific revolution. But what even the experts often fail to see is that he initiated an intellectual revolt that introduced a new intellectual temper.

Prior to Bacon people believed that it was possible to know things for what they were. In Plato and Aristotle, Moses and Solomon, St. Paul and Erasmus, one finds a consistent awareness that knowledge is not justly said to be power.

For the great western Christian classical tradition knowledge is apprehension, perception, relationship.

Such an awareness makes civilized life possible.

But in Bacon we hear the destructive philosophy of an elegant barbarian.

Let me draw an analogy to present times to explain my point. You will often read in the New York Times or USA Today or Wall Street Journal about how civilization has advanced over earlier western society or sometimes even over, say, the third world, because we have more advanced technology.

The widely held assumption of people who believe that such a thing as civilization might conceivably exist is that, if it exists, it is measured by technological advance, which is another phrase for power.

This is utter rubbish. Genghis Khan was amazingly advanced in some areas technologically. The gang-leader in LA has access to more advanced technology than Erasmus was able to conceive.

A person who believes that technology is the mark of civilized society is a barbarian himself. A person who believes that knowledge is power is both profoundly and utterly ignorant and a barbarian.

That knowledge gives power one cannot deny. The claim that knowledge is power is a revolt against the entire Christian and classical tradition.

I don’t want to imply that Bacon himself held to such a thoroughly barbaric conception of knowledge in all his thinking.

Nevertheless, after Bacon British thought embraced his axiom and developed an anti-philosophy under the name of Empiricism that has undercut civilized thought everywhere in the world.

I mean these claims to be taken quite seriously and not as mean-spirited ad hominems.

In fact, I might go so far as to claim that the difference between barbarians and civilized people is that the former lives by Bacon’s axiom and the latter live by something higher, richer, less easily coined, and more human and humane.

For example, in Plato, we see the groping of a mind for something beyond power, something that will harmonize the soul and the community. In Aristotle we read in his Metaphysics that “All men by nature desire to know,” and he goes on to explain that knowledge is an end in itself because knowledge itself is a delight to the soul.

What Aristotle meant, at least in part, was that, since our nature desires knowledge, we derive pleasure simply from knowing. We do not need to apply it, make it “relevant,” or derive some practical application from our knowledge.

Simply knowing gives us pleasure. So we keep our eyes open – and we don’t only look at the things that we might trip over. Sometimes we look at the stars in the sky even if they don’t provide any practical guidance.

Bacon’s axiom, on the other hand, would lead us to look at the stars only as astrologers or sailors.

Which might explain why we don’t teach astronomy much any more even though a cursory study of the history of science will reveal that all the natural sciences as studied in the western tradition developed out of the study of the stars.

Civilized people use things rightly. In other words, they deal with them according to their natures.

Bacon’s axiom (for which I will use the name Bacon from now on) led to the conclusion that things cannot be known in their natures. We can only “know” them from the outside.

The culmination of this teaching was reached in Dewey’s doctrines and is the unknown core principle of teaching in America.

He argued that knowledge in the Christian classical sense does not and cannot exist. Knowledge to the benighted Christian or classicist was derived from a hang-up on permanence.

But Bacon’s revolution was secured by Darwin who showed us that nothing is permanent.

Things don’t have a nature, Dewey argued (he used the term “species” following Aristotle). Things are like they are now, but their environments will cause them to become something other than what they are now in time.

There is no human nature. There is only the present state of the offspring of human parents.

The nature of things, therefore, cannot be known, since it does not exist.

Thus to set limits on things, which is a precondition for knowledge in the Christian and classical tradition, is both unnecessary and counterproductive.

Why set limits on what humanity can become? If people as smart as Dewey can only rule us, they can make us into something better than what we are now. So give us the schools and let us have our way.

Why set limits on what a word can mean?

Why set limits on what a text is saying?

Why set limits on what the state is allowed to do?

Why set limits?

Limits imply natures, and natures don’t exist.

The problems with such a horrific idea are manifold and would merit an encyclopaedia of their own. Our age is that encyclopaedia.

If you don’t set limits on what a word can mean, the word doesn’t mean anything. Take marriage for example.

If you don’t set limits on what a text can mean, the text doesn’t mean anything. Take our constitution for example.

If you don’t set limits on what the state can do, the state can do anything.

If you don’t set limits on what the object of your attention can be, you can’t give the object your attention.

To define is, by definition, to set limits on meanings. To remove the limits from meanings is to overthrow meaning itself.

To live a life without meaning is to be a barbarian.

Thus we delude ourselves to think we represent civilization. We live in a barbarian country.

We are all barbarians.

We don’t love civilization; we love meaningless equalities and limitless liberties and undefined powers.

What then is needed? Is it possible for us to become civilized?

It is possible, though it isn’t likely. Civilization is difficult and it requires submission.

First, it requires submission to reality. Civilization’s core principle is that all things must be treated according to their natures.

But the rewards are unspeakable, and the first of those rewards is that our souls can escape the lust for power that led Bacon to his foolish axiom and Nietzsche to his extension of it in his doctrine (much more worth reflecting on than Bacon’s) of the “will to power.”

Our souls can return to a right understanding of knowledge. For in the Christian classical tradition, knowledge is not power.

Knowledge is perception.

Knowledge is apprehension.

Knowledge is relation.

Civilized people recognize that right knowledge requires love because to perceive something for what it is we need to receive it into our souls as it is.

To receive something into our soul requires that we will the thing we seek to know.

Thus knowledge requires, first and foremost, a pure will in relation to the thing we seek to know.

Love does not feel good about its object or even desire, first, to be united to its object. Love wills its object – it wills the perfection and well-being of its object.

And this is possible only when the nature of the object is acknowledged and known.

Thus love alone makes accurate knowledge of the object possible.

I have a problem with people who are obsessed with form and can’t get it past it to the spirit of the thing. A long time ago a man named Mahaffey wrote a little book called Conversation that carried some wonderful counsel on how to be a good conversationalist.

In it he said:

The man who parades his logic is one of those poor and narrow thinkers whose over attention to form mars his comprehension of the matter and so leads him astray.

Exactly!

That is why I want students to learn form early in life, mastering as much of it as possible during the middle school years.

Otherwise one of two things will happen: one, they’ll disregard it more or less completely or two, they’ll overly attend to it.

For example, contemporary writers and readers are obsessed with form. If a sentence extends beyond two clauses they lose their minds. To use hyperbole (a little bit): every joint in the skeleton of a modern book is swollen with arthritis and you are made to stare at the joints when what you want to see is graceful movements.

You can’t. You have to stop for the period. After each clause. Or you will have to think too many thoughts. Too fast. And your mind can’t take it. You need a commercial break. Your brain has arthritis too.

This overly scientific and analytical mind, lost in its lack of self-awareness, is the plague of the common grammar class.

On the other hand, early training in form enables the student and writer to internalize the forms, to attain second nature reflexes, and thus to transcend mere form and follow it to the spirit of the idea expressed.

It my seem ironic, but the neglect of form in schools leads people to an obsession with form even as they think they are free of it. It’s a bit like a person who dresses like his peers to show that he is independent.

I’m leaving tomorrow for a trip to CA during which I will be creating videotapes of The Lost Tools of Writing. That’s the idea. Now the application: I’m very busy and shouldn’t be blogging right now.

But sometimes my emotions get the better of me, so I have to tell you all something – both negative and positive.

I’ve always tried to back my computer up, and it’s a good thing because my latest version has been dying lately.

Knowing it was on its way to its fate, I wanted to get a new one, but we haven’t had the resources at CiRCE to get one.

Well, yesterday one of our supporters made a contribution that enabled me to get a new a brand new computer!

Last night I went out to buy it, having lost the day to fighting with computer issues when I wanted to be finalizing my plans for Saturday’s video session.

I came home from the store last night and turned on my old computer so I could get the information I needed for E-mail and that sort of thing.

It was as dead as Marley.

Talk about timing.

It’s horribly inconvenient, of course, but I cannot imagine how much more inconvenient it would have been if the computer had died before I had the new one.

So I want to use this post to thank the donor who stepped forward and all the others who have been contributing during our fund-raising drive.

I mentioned we were seeking $50,000.

You have already contributed an astonishing $7000 of that $50,000.

Dozens of you have already downloaded the recordings of talks from Ken Myers, Laura Berquist, Andrew Pudewa, Vigen Guroian and others.

With the support we’ve received, a 2010 conference on Liberty looks promising, a third edition of Classical Education is hopeful, many refinements to LTW become possible, and I can continue to provide support to classical educators at every level of their involvement.

If you have already contributed and downloaded the talks: THANK YOU.

If you would like to do so, please follow this link or, better yet, click on the banner to the left (which lists the speakers and their sessions) and feed your soul while supporting Christian classical education through the CiRCE Institute!