Tag: Education

Is The Practice of Reading Doomed?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

Since this article was published on Michael Kirke’s Substack several weeks ago, surveys and reports continue to frighten us about the decrease in reading in nearly all segments of our population. Last year Britain’s National Literacy Trust reported that just 1 in 3 (32.7%) children and young people aged 8 to 18 said that they enjoyed reading in their free time in 2025. This marks a 36% decrease in reading enjoyment levels sincethe Trust started asking about this in 2005. The latest, in the past few days reported that children’s reading has decreased, while not dramatically, at least going in the wrong direction. A few days ago The Irish Times reported that the percentage of children who said they never read for fun was just 11 per cent in those aged between five and 12-years-old.

Harry Potter was supposed to have solved this problem. With a wave of his magic wand he seemed to have lured millions of young and not so young away from their smart devices and back to reading books. He hadn’t. Reading books, books in the hand, is once again a minority pursuit. 

We may worry about Large Language Models, LLMs, or Artificial Intelligence, as it is inaccurately called, and the unknowable destructive consequences we fear  it may bring in its wake. But AI is maybe just the last piece of a jigsaw which has already been composed and is already wreaking havoc on our civilisation.  And not only on our inherited values but on some of the fundamental characteristics which our culture has engrained in our human nature

In what is being described as one of the most important essays The Atlantic, the century-old and fabled American magazine, has published in recent years, one of its staff writers, Rose Horowitch asserts, in a study entitled, ‘The End of Reading’: “mass literacy may turn out to have been a relatively brief episode in human history rather than the permanent condition many assumed it would become.” 

Her argument is more than just an assertion that “people read fewer books.” She is asking whether, in what she identifies as a ‘post literate society’, an entire way of thinking is disappearing.

Her essay could indeed be taken as a companion piece to Pope Leo XIV’s magisterial recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. Her essay is very long but it is not quite as long as that document. However, it spells out in more alarming detail the rubicon which our civilisation may already have crossed, bringing to and end our republic of letters as Julius Caesar set in train the events which ended the Roman Republic.

Horowitch begins with Ptolemy’s Library of Alexandria as a symbol of civilization’s faith in written knowledge. He scoured the world for books and founded this library. She reminds us that reading is not an instinct but a learned cognitive technology. human beings evolved to speak; writing has existed for only a tiny fraction of our history. Literacy therefore requires continual cultural support. Failing to get that support, Alexandria’s library perished.

This is important because it means literacy can also decline and even disappear.

There is now strong evidence that Americans today read substantially fewer books than previous generations. Evidence about the rest of the world is mixed. The overall picture is complicated by the vast expansion of media forms – electronic and audible media have had a huge impact on physical book reading.

Surveys show that fewer people are making reading a central, habitual part of their leisure; nevertheless, many of those who still read continue to read deeply. The transformative  reality has been the substantial change from a print-centred hard-copy reading culture to a much more fragmented culture of print, e-books and audio—and, more fundamentally, a culture in which the book has to compete for attention with an unprecedented range of immediately available alternatives.

Interestingly Ireland may be an outlier in all this. A recent international consumer study found that 91% of Irish respondents had read a book during the previous year, compared with 85% across the 19 countries surveyed; 81% had bought a book. That makes Ireland rather different from the more pessimistic picture sometimes painted of the anglophone world. Perhaps the fact that per capita, Irish writers have won more Nobel Prizes for literature than any other country in the world has something to do with this.

One of Horowitch’s observations is that Americans probably consume more words than ever—emails, texts, captions, posts—but almost none of this requires sustained concentration. The issue is not the quantity of text but its character. Her main worry is that our practice of deep reading has diminished and in this she sees a threat to our very way of thinking, to our capacity to think clearly, imaginatively and even logically.

One might observe the reality of what passes for human dialogue in social media as an example of this degeneration. In the process of bringing about this disturbing change she does not argue that television or the internet have been the villains. Rather, the omnipresent electronic gadgets in our pockets, smartphones, are the real Trojan horses, with the powerful forces they unleash from their bellies.

Infinite novelty has always been a distracting force undermining our studied creativity by generating a kind of chaos in our minds. Add to that the temptation through which these devices urge us to immediate gratification. On top of this we have algorithmic optimisation which generates a flood of constant interruption. While Meta and Co. have refused to accept responsibility for this in the case of their young consumers, they have nevertheless agreed – more or less – to pay $17 billion dollars in compensation for the damage US courts declare that they have done. That figure may be just a fraction of what they, YouTube, TikTock and other players will end up paying across the world.

Horowitch herself still enjoys novels once immersed in them, but getting over the initial barrier has become much harder because the discipline of attention has been corrupted by so many competing agents.

Horowitch also looks at all this in an educational context, ranging from early learning to the pinnacle of third level. A college professor assigned Bleak House as a text to students, asking for a precis of its opening paragraphs. The professor was presented with absolute gobledegook, probably with what we now call slop. Metaphors, other literary devices, nuances, were all garbled showing a dreadful incapacity to move beyond a nakedly literal reading.

Professors are reporting that students struggle to finish assigned books, prefer summaries of great books, expect lectures to replace reading, regard reading itself as an unnecessarily inefficient method of acquiring information. One professor says students increasingly feel that assigning a book is deliberately making knowledge harder to obtain. For Horowitch that observation is especially striking because it suggests a different conception of education. The goal shifts from forming a mind to simply delivering information.

Horowitch sees the arrival of AI as potentially worsening the problem. If AI reliably summarizes books, articles and arguments, many people may conclude there is little reason to read originals. AI can be a help to understanding complex and deep texts but the inevitable path of least resistance may trump all that. Ironically, she thinks, the technology most capable of generating text may reduce the number of humans who actually engage with it deeply. 

But for Horowitch this is not just a matter of losing the pleasure of reading great and meaningful  literature. It is about something which will have – and already has – and impact on the way we live our lives together and promote human flourishing. Look again at Magnifica Humanitas for a detailed and wisdom-filled reflection on this.

Anthony Trollope’s  late novel, The Way we Live Now is a rich piece of nineteenth century literature but it is also a critique of the degeneration of the society of his time and the corruption of values which utilitarianism and the industrial revolution brought in their wake. It predates Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum which addressed the same problem on a more theological and sociological level.

As we alluded to earlier, our technological prowess seems to be killing our capacity for  logical argument, respect for evidence, capacity to handle nuance and any appreciation of the value of delaying judgement. Our post-literate society instead, above all, values performance, celebrity and personality, putting emotional immediacy before reflection.

Horowitch  suggests that politics inevitably changes when citizens no longer habitually read extended arguments. In her view we live in a dangerous time. If literacy declines, civilization itself changes—not because books are morally superior, but because they cultivate a distinctive mode of thought. The danger is not simply that people know less, but that they lose the mental habits that only extended reading reliably develops.

On my bookshelves sits one of my moat valued texts. It is the late Professor Denis Donoghue’s exploration of reading as an enriching human pursuit. Its title is The Practice of Reading. We must do all we can to ensure that never becomes a meaningless phrase.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey  – and Homer before him – reminded us of the Late Bronze Age Collapse. The obliteration of the Library of Alexandria was the prelude to the collapse of the classical world. In the intervening centuries until now we have had a number of close shaves, not least the scourge of secularism and its pseudo-religious offspring, wokism.  We should be aware that we take our civilisation for granted at our peril.

The Other Steubenville

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The New Yorker is a world famous magazine, not least famous for the very quirky sense of humour of its very prolific team of cartoonists. But it is also famous for its long, very long, essays and articles. What it is not famous for is positive and sympathetic articles, long or otherwise about things Catholic. I’m not alleging it is anti-Catholic. Let’s just say you would not think of it as a place to go to reinforce your Catholic convictions.

For that last reason it was a great and pleasant surprise to find in a recent issue (April 17) a very balanced upbeat essay on a new and very encouraging Catholic educational and social initiative in the state of Ohio, USA. Its relevance stretches well beyond the state of Ohio.

The essay, by  staff writer Emma Green, was long, indeed very long, – and fascinating to read – about a faith motivated venture, even adventure, which addresses not only a kind of black hole facing young people, particularly young males, in the essentially dysfunctional third-level US higher educational system today. Indeed it is a dysfunction paralleled in many Western societies.

What follows is an attempt at an abridgement of Ms Green’s very interesting description of this experiment.

Her essay begins with the story – so far – of a young man from Michigan, just across the Great Lakes from Ohio. His name is Brendan LaFave

Brendan grew up in a big Catholic family—the second-eldest of eight siblings living in a large house in Ann Arbor. He’s tall, with shaggy hair and an earnest manner, the kind of preternaturally thoughtful kid that adults love. He excelled at his Catholic high school, navigating calculus with ease, building sets for student theatre productions, and playing a box drum at worship events. But he also felt as if he had been born in the wrong era. His generation’s reliance on screens was making him miserable. After getting an iPhone in middle school, he spent several years “terminally on Snapchat and Instagram,” he said, which made his friendships with other kids feel shallow. “It just did a number on me,” he explained. “It caused a subtle depression.” 

Brendan had plenty of options for after graduation; he had earned a nearly perfect score on the A.C.T. (standardized test for college readiness).  But the University of Michigan did not attract him. He toyed with the idea of becoming a construction worker and just doing a lot of reading on the side. “I was very averse to the idea of college debt,” he said. “I had these ideas floating around about the spiritual life and pursuing the life of the intellect, and then working with my hands.”

As LaFave was thinking it over, he heard a discussion on a podcast. In it, a group of Catholic intellectuals discussed a new school opening in Steubenville, a small city in Ohio. Students would take classes on subjects such as the New Testament, advanced geometry, and rhetoric, and earn a liberal-arts degree in Catholic studies. At the same time, they would specialize in one of four trades—carpentry,  electrical work, heating and ventilation, or plumbing—and work toward a certificate that signalled their expertise. The school was called the College of St. Joseph the Worker.

“We’re totally trying to call the bluff on the great divorce between the head and the hands,” Jacob Imam, the college’s founder, said on the podcast. His ambition is to reverse the idea that blue-collar work is no longer dignified.  Unlike many other schools, which Imam described as keeping students contained in a “bubble,” the College of St. Joseph the Worker would expose students to the real world by having them work as apprentices, fixing up buildings and using their wages to pay their tuition and living expenses. The goal was for them to graduate debt-free.  

For Brendan LaFave this seemed to tick all the boxes. He joined the first cohort of students, in the fall of 2024.

The college currently has sixty-two students. Imam’s diagnosis of the generation he is trying to reach is that after growing up online, young men seem to be more anxious and depressed than older generations, and in the worst cases they are incapacitated: nursing porn addictions, failing to launch, flirting with Holocaust denial. The College of St. Joseph the Worker was founded as a proposition that lost young men shouldn’t be condemned or written off.

“We find them on the internet,” Imam told Green. “We bring them here. And we say, ‘How about a life in reality instead?’ ”

“Reality,” in this case, is Steubenville. 

In the past half-century, Steubenville has quietly emerged as a paradise for big Catholic families. That is Emma Green’s description. In the nineteen-seventies, Franciscan University, a liberal arts college, was established  on a hill above the downtown area.  It was founded by the Third Order Regular of St. Francis, or TOR Franciscans. Now, across the Catholic world at least, it is universally identified as Steubenville University. One of its best known professors is the prolific author, theologian and Catholic new-evangelist, Scott Hahn

But now there is another Steubenville. It is this small College of St Joseph the Worker. Its campus is in downtown Steubenville, in a handful of run-down blocks around Fourth Street. As Imam said, the college aims to give its students an education that is not just about their work but about their lives—instilling in them a sense of purpose, restoring their feeling of competence, teaching them virtue. But it also exists to help rescue Steubenville from its rust-belt fate. 

Marc Barnes, a thirty-two-year-old professor at the college, is the unofficial hype man of the downtown-revitalization effort. He first moved to Steubenville to become a student at Franciscan, in 2010. Then as now, many of the downtown buildings were boarded up. With barely any money, Barnes and roughly a dozen friends set about trying to bring some life back to Steubenville. 

In 2017, Barnes temporarily left Steubenville to pursue a graduate degree in theology in England. A friend introduced him to Jacob Imam, who was in Oxford doing his own graduate studies. Imam was different from the scrappy Steubenville types with whom Barnes had spent his twenties. Unlike Barnes, who was born and raised Catholic, Imam had found his way to Catholicism later, after growing up in an interfaith household, with a Palestinian Muslim father and an evangelical mother. He was a consummate high achiever, a collector of mentors who quickly clocked him as a kid destined for great things. When he was in his first month of college, at Baylor University, a professor suggested that he apply for the Marshall and the Rhodes scholarships for postgraduate study in the U.K. 

Barnes met Imam in a moment of soul-searching. Imam was headed toward a career in academia, but he felt queasy about participating in a debt-driven higher-ed system that can sometimes be more of a prison than a launching pad. “But I’m not inclined toward élite culture.” Barnes persuaded Imam and his new wife, Alice, to join the project in Steubenville, and the couple bought a house there in 2019. 

For years, Imam had been nursing the idea that he might develop some of these ideas into something more concrete—a new kind of college. 

Imam got initial donations from a few friends at Oxford, and eventually raised enough money to purchase the building that would become  ‘the Workshop’—a vast, open warehouse with timber-filled bays. He made his first hires and began working on state approval.

The model of this remarkable college is work, study, prayer. Every morning, the students are encouraged to attend the eight o’clock Mass at the downtown Catholic parish. They have a full academic load, taking around three courses  per quarter. 

On top of this, the students practice their respective trades. The standards are high: students may get nearly twice as many instructional hours as what’s required by the state of Ohio. Students also spend a significant amount of time on worksites. Often, in traditional apprenticeships Last year, the college formed its own construction company, on the logic that it could give students apprenticeship opportunities and make money from jobs. 

The college has so far bought up and started renovating more than a dozen buildings. The college’s students will be the ones doing this work. Just by being there, they have changed the town. 

Imam has attracted some powerful patrons, such as Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and Republican Presidential candidate, who has introduced him to donors in the Catholic world. Santorum said that he sees Imam’s project as part of the fight to revive small-town America. “There are thousands of Steubenvilles, small towns that were once bustling industrial hubs, that are now really struggling,” Santorum told Green. “The very thing that made all these towns across America so successful, and knitted the communities together, was that combination of family and faith and industry—the village, if you will.”

The idea to have a college where students get a liberal-arts education, do physical labor, and pay their way is not new. Congress has awarded special funding to a handful of so-called Work Colleges for more than thirty years, and some small liberal-arts schools had work programs long before that.

However, the College of St. Joseph the Worker is distinct. It does not accept federal funding, including student financial aid; like many other conservatives, Imam believes that the federal government is too involved with education, and he wants the college to retain full control over its policies and curricula. The college also views skilled labor not just as an enriching experience on the way to a white-collar job but as a vocation. A core goal is to cultivate leaders on worksites, to be “the Harvard of this sort of thing,” Imam said.

In the world of higher education, there’s long been an insistence that college is for everyone, but this has resulted in many graduates unable to find suitable jobs; the employment prospects of English majors—or even computer-science grads—are looking increasingly grim. Meanwhile, there’s an acute shortage of skilled tradesmen around the country. Young people with these skills will likely be able to find well-paid work anywhere they want, long after many laptop jobs are made obsolete by A.I.

The college’s gift shop displays copies of “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” a 2009 book by the writer Matthew B. Crawford, which argues that the skilled trades require a level of mental and intellectual sophistication that often goes underacknowledged. “Because the work is dirty, people tend to assume it’s stupid,” Crawford said. Trade school is often talked about as an alternative to a four-year degree, but the discourse can be patronizing, with jobs in construction framed as an off-ramp for the kids who can’t cut it in real college. Crawford thinks that narrative is precisely backward: “There’s a burnout, and a sense of worthlessness, that hovers in the background of the laptop class—a kind of spiritual malaise.”

Perhaps it’s more generous to see the College of St. Joseph the Worker—along with the handful of other nascent Catholic trade schools that have recently popped up, in Michigan and Illinois and California—as a manifestation of America’s populist moment. Crawford maintains that “When you know how things work, how to repair them, how to build them in the first place, I think it gives you a little bit more of an independent ground to stand on against claims of expertise.”

In Steubenville there is a bookshop called  Bookmarx (no irony intended). It is owned by John Kuhner and his wife, Catherine. Kuhner believes there will be people living in Steubenville in two hundred years. “Whether or not that means this bookstore will still turn a profit in four years—something like that is a different question,” he said. For now, his parish is lively and full of young families. His kids run up and down their block with friends their age. Sometimes, “you just feel like we’re camping out in the ruins,” Kuhner told me. “But I never feel without purpose here. And I never feel alone.”

What is a catholic school?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

You might like to attend the zoom launch of Our School is Catholic – So What on Thursday night at 8 pm  This book promises to be an important contribution to the debates of the value of Catholic education. It is written in an Irish context but its relevance and value extends beyond the shores of that island nation.  It deals with the curriculum framework for Primary Schools, new directions in education for relationships and sexuality, the examination system and its side effects, and much more. It is available now from www.sowhat.ie for purchase.

You can also register on the website for in-depth Book club discussions on the book during October – December. 

Topic: Our School is Catholic book launch

Time: Sep 23, 2021 08:00 PM Dublin

Join Zoom Meeting

https://zoom.us/j/94315125099?pwd=ZStLMHEzU2hJWmt0dm52aS9KczliUT09

Meeting ID: 943 1512 5099

Passcode: welcome

Aftershocks of a pandemic

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

“The parents weren’t just upset about all the screen time their kids were logging. They were upset about what they saw on those screens. For the first time, millions of moms and dads could watch, in real time, their children’s teachers teaching.”

That’s just one more aftershock from the great pandemic of the twenty-twenties.

We have all become aware of the workplace upheaval in which the world’s biggest corporations and the state bureaucracies of the planet – not to mention the real estate industry – are all grappling with the existential phenomenon of working-from-home. Pre-pandemic social communication had already made something of sea-change in our lives but the infliction of lockdown, while not perhaps being the mother of Zoom and its fellow inventions, was certainly the booster rocket which sent them into orbit, giving us meetings at our finger-tips and a new meaning to dropping in on family, friends and neighbours for a chat.

The architecture of the entire teaching-learning edifice which our world has known for the duration of what we call modern times now looks like it is in the process of a radical redevelopment, if not a wholesale demolition and rebuild. Not least among its structural features facing radical change is that which has taken care of which is perhaps its most lovable and most precious responsibility, elementary education.

Post-pandemic, millions of new families are moving to undertake the elementary education of their own children.

And why not? Are we so blind that we cannot see the logic, the justice and the beautiful privilege that the best educated generation in human history have the ability, and should have the right, to educate their own children. “Education bureaucrats, leave those kids alone!”

Barri Weiss’ Common Sense on the Substack platform spells out some of the details of this apparent landslide freedom movement in a guest post from another Weiss, Suzy by name, (sister, cousin?). In an age when the family has been put in greater danger than it has been in over one hundred years this is really good news. Not since the Marxist revolutions of the early part of the last century tried to obliterate the family, has it been so threatened. This movement is a real sign of hope. And this is not just for children but for the whole of western society. This is a revolutionary counter-revolution, a whiff of grapeshot moment of the kind in which Napoleon tore into the murderous zealots who had taken control of the French Revolution.

Throughout the western world – and increasingly encroaching on the societies and cultures of the rest of the planet – progressive elites with their bizarre readings of human nature, and what they think they can do with it, have penetrated education systems like a dry-rot penetrating the fabric of a building. That ordinary families with common sense and their feet on the real ground might take over the education of their children in their formative years is an anathema to these elites. The progressivists, academia and the teacher unions which they dominate, will resist but they must not be let undermine this most natural of movements.

These are some of the insights into this revolution which Suzy Weiss gives us in her post. The entire post is here.

In March 2020, as the coronavirus engulfed America, Kristen Wrobel got the news: “We heard on Friday that there would be no school for two weeks. Which just turned into no school.”

That was the last time her children — one in third grade, one in first —  were in a classroom.

In the beginning, they did the remote-school thing. Wrobel, a 42-year-old stay-at-home mom with a bachelor’s degree in software engineering, called it a “nightmare.” The Zoom sessions, the Italian lessons on Duolingo, the stuff she had to print out, the isolation, the tears, the nagging, the shuttling the kids between her house, near Burlington, Vermont, and their dad’s, a half-hour away.

“Everyone was freaking out all the time,” she said. 

By May, at the risk of violating state truancy laws, Wrobel had stopped fighting and let her kids log on (or not) whenever they felt like it. It was, she said, “the darkest hour before dawn.”

That September, she started homeschooling. She didn’t like all the restrictions her kids’ private school had implemented: Students seated six feet apart. Masked. In wedding tents. Outside. 

She figured she’d send her kids back to the school in 2021, after everything had gone back to normal. 

That was then. Now? “There’d have to be a revolution in schooling.” 

She’s hardly alone. Wrobel is one of hundreds of thousands of moms and dads across the nation who have decided to become the principals of their very own, very small elementary schools. 

The number of kids going to school at home nationwide has doubled over the past two years. In 2019, there were about 2.5 million students learning at home. Today there are nearly 5 million. That means more than 11 percent of American households are educating their children outside of traditional schools.

In Wrobel’s state of Vermont, homeschool applications are up 75 percent. And that’s in the northeast, where regulations are strictest. The phenomenon is exploding across the country. In North Carolina, the site for registering homeschools crashed last summer. In California, applications for homeschooling tripled from 2020 to 2021. In Alaska, more than a quarter of students in the state are now homeschooled. 

In Texas and Florida, parents are not required to notify the state, so it’s hard to know exactly how many kids are learning at home. But just one South Florida school, Jupiter Farms Elementary, saw 10 percent of its student population withdraw for this school year. Almost all of them are being taught at home.

The American Schoolhouse was in serious disrepair before 2020 — about that no one would disagree. But the events of last year tore the whole thing down to the studs. First, the pandemic. Then, the lockdowns. Then the summer of unrest: George Floyd, the protests, the riots, the mea culpas. Many local school boards seemed more concerned about teaching critical race theory and renaming schools than reopening them. Parents didn’t know what to do — what was safe, what was right, whom to trust. It was like being inside a tornado.

These were changes that rocked every American family.  So perhaps it’s no surprise that the homeschooling trend cuts across geographic, political, and racial lines: Black, Latino and Asian families are even likelier than white ones to educate their children at home. 

All of this is undermining the old, Democratic-educational complex — the powerful teacher unions and the office-holders beholden to those unions —  that has long maintained an iron-clad grip on tens of thousands of schools and the fate of tens of millions of American students. And it is forcing a long overdue reimagining of the way we educate children: the subjects they study, the values instilled in them, and the economy for which they are being prepared. 

Maria Magallanes homeschools Zola West, 7, a child who lives next door, at the Magallanes home in Alexandria, Virginia, in April 2020.(Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

For decades now voices have been crying in the wilderness about the corruption of academia and lower reaches of the teaching profession. Instead of getting better they just got worse and worse, crazier and crazier – and utterly arrogant.

Consider what Peter Boghossian had to bring himself to say in this post, also courtesy of Bari Weiss: “…brick by brick, the university has made… intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.”

Shortly after Boghossian ‘came out’ and took on the ideologues ” swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department. They also occasionally showed up on my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces. Our university remained silent. When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators.”

There is no doubt, the Red Guards are back and they are not just in the United States. This kind of experience, in one form or another is replicating itself all over the academic world, formerly the free world.

In recent times it was depressingly hard to see from where the light at the end of the tunnel would come that would effectively bring about the change that is needed to bring an end to this cultural crisis. What our society and our civilisation is facing is truly worrying. Perhaps this is what is needed: a new generation, educated in common sense and with a grip on what true human values really are.

Mad dogs and Englishmen

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Noel Coward’s famous song, Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun may need to be revisited – with a little bit of reworking – in the light of a report in today’s Daily Telegraph. It reports that a British watchdog, its Equality and Human Rights Commission, has a secret proposal on its desk to compel girls’ schools in England and Wales to admit boys who present themselves for admission as girls. Or whatever. God help us. With clearly rabid watchdogs like that roaming the streets they better all say goodbye to the sun. A dark age has arrived.

Is it any wonder that the home-schooling movement is taking off at record speed?

The paper reports:

Girls’ schools would have to admit transgender pupils under proposals being considered by the equalities watchdog. The confidential Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) draft guidance, leaked to The Telegraph, reveals schools could be set to consider admissions of trans students to single-sex schools on a “case-by-case approach”. Schools were supposed to be issued with the first official national guidelines on transgender children in March 2018. However, following repeated delays, it has never been published. However The Telegraph can now reveal details which have never before been made public.

Is transgender madness a bottomless pit?

The EHCR report says that: “A refusal to admit a trans pupil to a single-sex school which is the same as the trans pupil’s sex recorded at birth would be direct sex discrimination. Admitting such a pupil will not affect the school’s single-sex status. 

“A pupil who has transitioned, or wants to, must be allowed to continue to attend the school; to remove them would amount to direct gender reassignment discrimination.”

The document also says: “An admission policy of only admitting pupils in accordance with their sex recorded at birth would particularly disadvantage trans pupils, and would be indirectly discriminatory against trans pupils, unless it could be demonstrated to be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.”

For good measure, in case you did not know, these (courtesy of the Telegraph again) are samples of the new language being dictated to us:

Gender-neutral terms | Checklist

Forefathers – ancestors, forebears

Gentleman’s agreement – unwritten agreement, agreement based on trust

Girls (for adults) – women

Housewife – shopper, consumer, homemaker (depends on context)

Manpower – human resources, labour force, staff, personnel, workers, workforce

Man or mankind – humanity, humankind, human race, people.

So, watch your language.

Guadalupe Ortiz, a scientist, a teacher, and more…

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters, Faith MattersLeave a comment

The Cross first came to Guadalupe at the age of 20 in the form of a tragic event – the execution of her father by a firing squad

 

Guadalupe Ortiz, the first woman member of Opus Dei to be beatified

Guadalupe Ortiz de Landázuri

The lives of saints, even the lives of great but ordinary people, who may also be saints without our knowing it, are often marked by great suffering. There is no such thing as holiness without Christ’s Cross.

This was certainly a distinguishing characteristic of a woman who will be beatified next week. On May 18, Guadalupe Ortiz, a scientist, a teacher, and much more, will be honoured in a stadium more commonly associated with rock concerts than with religious devotion.

The Cross first came to Guadalupe at the age of 20 in the form of a tragic event – the execution of her father by a firing squad.

Guadalupe bore this ordeal with exemplary serenity. Who is to say that the marks of this cross were not part of the foundation on which she later built that life of dedication to God and service to her fellow human beings, across two continents.

Read this article in full in The Tablet online.

Food for thought – about millennials

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

This has been around for a few months but it is well worth checking out in case you have not seen it. It is a calm but very astute summing up on the time bomb which the world may be sitting on.

There is no question but that the generation we call ‘millennials’ has within its ranks some very creative minds with strong characters to go with them. But the overall assessment of this generation is for many a cause for concern.

Our only complaint about this particular assessment might be that, in true millennial spirit, the blame is not laid at their door – but at the door of their parents.

The most devastating ecological disaster of all?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Is this something we should be worried about? If even a fraction of what Camille Paglia is saying here is true, it is hard to argue that it is not a matter which should deeply concern us. Our universities, more than ever before, are where the minds of the future are forming themselves – and a true university will always see that the most important work being done there is the work the students themselves do. But if they can form themselves then the reverse is also true. They can deform themselves.

Cultures have become degenerate in the past. Civilizations have disintegrated and vanished. Somehow new civilizations emerge eventually – but the human cost, the loss and the suffering which human kind experiences in the trough between these two peaks can be the stuff of nightmares. Will some scholars in centuries from now, perhaps even millennia from now, find these words of Paglia – and God only knows what medium they will find them in – and say here was the Cassandra or the Tiresias of the 20th and 21st century,  Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs, (who) perceived the scene, and foretold the rest…     

Totalitarianism dressed in the garments of righteousness

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

“There is now an extraordinary situation where State-funded third-level colleges are openly advising would-be teachers that their career prospects depend on their religious faith.”

 

The hidden secular totalitarianism of this statement is what is “extraordinary”.

 

Fintan O’Toole’s proclaimed agenda – emphasised again in his Irish Times column today – is to deprive the citizen-parents of this country of one of their fundamental civil and human rights – that of being supported by the state in their work as primary educators of their children.

 

The Irish State funds third-level colleges to train teachers who will work in primary schools which the vast majority of the parents of this country wish to be “faith” schools, that is, schools in which their children will learn about their faith and grow in their knowledge of and commitment to the God whom that faith proclaims.

 

The State does this because it is the will of the people that it should do so. The details as to how to manage a fair distribution of scarce resources – given the religious denominations represented in the population – is another matter. But it does not lead us to a conclusion that the faith commitment of those staffing the schools is something irrelevant.

 

For that reason it would surely be extraordinary if teacher training colleges did not point out to their students that their commitment to a particular faith might be a factor influencing whether or not they might be successful in applying to a post in the majority of schools.

 

The day in which this will become irrelevant will the day in which schools will have given up on a responsibility which the majority of the citizens of this State have chosen to share with them, denying them their rights in the process. The rights of parents to have their children educated are primary. In this context, the rights of teachers to have jobs are secondary.

 

The anti-faith secularism of O’Toole and the militant new atheists is not just extraordinary. It is profoundly sinister and utterly cynical in the manner in which it is dressed up in the garments of righteousness.

Sad fate of poetry in our education system

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Billy Collins

The point of reading a poem is not to try to “solve” it. Still, that quantifiable process of demystification is precisely what teachers are encouraged to teach students, often in lieu of curating a powerful experience through literature. The literature itself becomes secondary, boiled down to its Cliff’s Notes demi-glace. 

These are the words of a teacher who confesses that 16 years after enjoying a high school literary education rich in poetry, I am a literature teacher who barely teaches it. So far this year, my 12th grade literature students have read nearly 200,000 words for my class. Poems have accounted for no more than 100.

This is a shame—not just because poetry is important to teach, but also because poetry is important for the teaching of writing and reading.

Andres Simmons is an American and he is writing in The Atlantic. He explores  the fate of poetry in the modern classroom – and the fate of the students deprived of a good education through poetry, deprived of one of  the richest and enriching means of expressing our understanding and feelings about the human condition that there is.

In an education landscape that dramatically deemphasizes creative expression in favor of expository writing and prioritizes the analysis of non-literary texts, high school literature teachers have to negotiate between their preferences and the way the wind is blowing. That sometimes means sacrifice, and poetry is often the first head to roll.

Yet poetry enables teachers to teach their students how to write, read, and understand any text. Poetry can give students a healthy outlet for surging emotions. Reading original poetry aloud in class can foster trust and empathy in the classroom community, while also emphasizing speaking and listening skills that are often neglected in high school literature classes.

He admits that one of the biggest problems is that teachers either shy away from the proper method of introducing their students to poetry or lack the skills to do so.

Either of these failures leads the temptation to disembowel a poem’s meaning and diminish the personal, even transcendent, experience of reading a poem. He quotes Billy Collins who characterizes the latter as a “deadening” act that obscures the poem beneath the puffed-up importance of its interpretation. In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” Collins writes:  “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope/and torture a confession out of it./They begin beating it with a hose/to find out what it really means.”

Sad fate.