We made books built to outlast us.
Cloth bound with smyth-sewn bindings, printed in the United States. Twelve children's classics across four box sets, Æsop to Shakespeare.
Chapter House is open for pre-order. Our first limited print run will ship in June.
https://t.co/WmjEZju9nH
Even the King James Bible’s most famous adversary concedes the point.
@RichardDawkins says a native English speaker who has never read it is “verging on the barbarian.”
We agree. The KJV gave English 257 everyday phrases, more than Shakespeare.
https://t.co/vH4d4YBbcg
@KateKinard A little bird tells us Chapters I and II are shipping next week. We are still waiting on Chapters III and IV from the printer, but they are due the second half of June.
We made books built to outlast us.
Cloth bound with smyth-sewn bindings, printed in the United States. Twelve children's classics across four box sets, Æsop to Shakespeare.
Chapter House is open for pre-order. Our first limited print run will ship in June.
https://t.co/WmjEZju9nH
Reminds me of the first Doctor William Hartnell. He famously refused to just fiddle with random buttons and instead memorised what every single button and lever on the TARDIS console did He told the directors: "The kids look at this... if I turn the wrong knob, they'll know."
You scheduled an hour of reading. Twenty minutes in, the squirming starts. By the end, it feels like punishment.
You conclude your child does not like reading.
That is the wrong lesson.
Charlotte Mason limited lessons to fifteen or twenty minutes, not because she doubted their capacity, but because she respected their attention.
The mind, like a muscle, fatigues.
An hour of forced concentration teaches only resistance.
Twenty minutes daily, for a year adds up 120 hours, which is longer than most high school literature courses.
A small daily act, repeated until it becomes identity.
https://t.co/lrlElJXSWh
Should we open subscriptions on Virtue and Wonder? We have no plans to paywall content, but Substack tells us we will instantly be labeled a “best seller” if we get even one paid subscriber.
You scheduled an hour of reading. Twenty minutes in, the squirming starts. By the end, it feels like punishment.
You conclude your child does not like reading.
That is the wrong lesson.
Charlotte Mason limited lessons to fifteen or twenty minutes, not because she doubted their capacity, but because she respected their attention.
The mind, like a muscle, fatigues.
An hour of forced concentration teaches only resistance.
Twenty minutes daily, for a year adds up 120 hours, which is longer than most high school literature courses.
A small daily act, repeated until it becomes identity.
https://t.co/lrlElJXSWh
-The reason for the existence of the Classics (in the West at least) is to promulgate Hero Cult. (See Homer).
-Heroes tell us who we are, both as Humans in general and as A People, in particular
-Everyone should embrace Hero Cult. Rejection of it leads to failure
-The question is always "Which Hero is the Best" (This is Homer's question in Iliad and Odyssey, fwiw).
-Christianity offers its own answer. I accept and affirm this answer.
-But even if you pick one as the best, you are certainly allowed to have more than one - and really, you need more than one.
-Even if you reject the pagan heroes as such, you should accept the premise, that you need hero cult
Not sure I got *all* this across in this World interview article (check it out) but I'm grateful to the good people there and @freire_emma in particular for putting it together.
A High School required reading list from 1978.
Yes, students under 18 years old read:
-Homer's The Odyssey & The Iliad
-Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote
-Herman Melville's Moby Dick
-Virgil's Aeneid
-Tolstoy's War and Peace
-Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
How many books on this list have you read?
“In addition to ensuring a highly literate teaching staff, as an administrator, I would want a pool of teachers who were intellectually curious. The best educators are those who remain students in some form or fashion themselves, and books are often among the best teachers.”
More and more I'm learning that the nihilistic claptrap we were all told was genius was just Leftist demoralization propaganda.
Situations like this have occurred, and the children didn't turn into little monsters. In fact they survived quite well.
In June 1965, six boys named, aged 13 to 16 "borrowed" a fisherman’s boat hoping to reach Fiji or New Zealand. After a storm damaged the sail and rudder, they drifted for eight days surviving on fish and rainwater collected in coconut shells, before washing up on the rocky uninhabited island of ‘Ata.
Rather than descending into chaos during their months there the boys created a mini society. They planted vegetables, collected and stored rainwater, and maintained a permanent fire. They even built a gymnasium with homemade weights, a badminton court, and chicken pens.
They divided daily chores using rosters, resolved conflicts with time-outs instead of fighting, began and ended each day with songs and prayers. One boy, Gilligan's Isle style, constructed a guitar from driftwood and coconut shell to boost morale. When one of the children broke his leg falling off a cliff the others set it with sticks and leaves and took over his work. They ate fish, coconuts, eggs, wild taro, bananas, and later chickens they had discovered in an ancient volcanic crater.
They endured this for for fifteen months, and never once turned into murderous thugs. A far cry from what we were told would happen.