No pictures this time. It's been a while. Work is picking up tremendous speed due to a mass move we will conduct in January overseas. But it's only for 7 months and then we will be back. With any luck, all of our well trained employees will return but the competing organization will have less.
The state of my children's education has been on my mind of late. I recollect something I learned some time ago about the foundations of our American education system being based on the Prussian model. What that means, or, rather, what that entails is a system constructed to create automatons. The Prussian model was a cog in the Austrian-Germanic war identity. It was very type cast and the ruling elite wanted a mass of automatic, taught by memorization but robbed of conceptual thought, pawns with which to send into battle for something so silly as nationalism. What that required was the training up of thinking things to be simply acting things, creatures happy to pull levers and push buttons, willing to without question obey as a master might direct.
I believe that we have dark remnants of that here in America. We have developed into a rather knee jerk society, angry at race because bleating philistines on the TV tell us to be; happy to spend money we don't have because vacuous women and men in false bodies tell us it is good. We even vote for highly qualified circuit lecturers to high office because some media machine recommends it.
So I did the best thing I could for my boys: I bought an abacus. We are surrounded by parents with children very good at vomiting a whole print ribbon worth of neat-a-ry. But to these poor babies they are sounds. Just sounds. I am reading the ancient Romans and Greeks. I found a library collection from the 1950's that has assembled every important work of literature since a thousand years before Christ. And I mean it. It is a 20 volume set of about 20,000 pages. It seems those old smart Greek and Roman philosophers and great teachers that prophets and sages today quote and cite felt it right to teach a boy physical courage and valor until he was about 7 or 8. Then they started in with the genius, and not memorization, but conceptualization. For my boys, they know and understand physical courage and I can calmly state that they fear no man or animal except those they should. And papa destroys those with heavy hand and unyielding strength. We have thus taken our journey into the land of mathematics, the conceptual kind. Silas knows his numbers well up to 20 without a beat. But what do they mean? As it turns out, in his 4 year old mind, not much. Or they did not mean much. But now, with the advent of our rod and bead device that slides, he has learned that 10 beads is equal to 10 fingers is equal to 10 speakers on the wall or 10 rail road tracks on the ground. In other words, he knows now that the concept "10"is a conceptualization of individual units brought together 10 times over! I cannot tell you how exciting that is to me. This is the foundation of arithmetic, the foundation of mathematics, which is to be the foundation of his rational, logical mind and his conquering of emotion! And that is to rule the world where ever you are, where animals that grew out of men bleat and demand to be fed by someone or something because they abdicated the ability to do it themselves.
It is good to be 4 and to understand the what time forgot.
