Quotes To Ponder

Just a couple of quotes for the weekend.

This first one rings along the line of something I've been thinking as of late. Home school is becoming something I don't like. Not the actual act of home school. That, with my own little brood, tucked deep within my home, I adore. It's the monster thing of industry that home school is fast becoming that I fear and loathe. I suppose that do a degree, this seeming boom in home school industry is a blessing. Curriculum and activities directed at home schoolers abound, but I think that is also a curse. It seems in many circles to be becoming all about what you buy and where you take class.

No thank you. I don't want home school that comes in a box and looks like every other cereal on the shelf. I want mine to look like the bounty of the produce section, raw, ripe and colorful. Seasonal and local.

Yup. I'm some kinda nut.

Here's the first quote, taken from the Daily Reckoning, and written by James Howard Kunstler in an essay titled Disarray.

"We'd better prepare psychologically to downscale all institutions, including government, schools and colleges, corporations, and hospitals. All the centralizing tendencies and gigantification of the past half-century will have to be reversed. Government will be starved for revenue and impotent at the higher scale. The centralized high schools all over the nation will prove to be our most frustrating mis-investment. We will probably have to replace them with some form of home-schooling that is allowed to aggregate into neighborhood units. A lot of colleges, public and private, will fail as higher ed ceases to be a "consumer"activity. Corporations scaled to operate globally are not going to make it. This includes probably all national chain "big box"operations. It will have to be replaced by small local and regional business. We'll have to reopen many of the small town hospitals that were shuttered in recent years, and open many new local clinic-style health-care operations as part of the greater reform of American medicine."

Hmm. Education--public and private akin to the big box stores. Hmm. What scares me is that home school seems to be following right along into the big box thing instead of doing what it was known for. Thinking for itself. Aren't we home educators supposed to be just a bit rebellious? Aren't we supposed to be just a bit wary of all that glitters and all that says baa while being led to a pen?

A second thought to ponder this weekend comes from my current reading, Walden by Thoreau.

"I would not subtract any thing from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man's uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick, serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion."

What could I possibly add to that?