Making History

1. I am currently at a conference in Princeton.  The conference is a joint operation of the McConnell Center and the Liberty Fund, which brings Kentucky school teachers (a mix of elementary, middle and high school social science teachers) together for a week long discussion of “Liberty in the Western Tradition.”  They invited me down to be one of the discussion leaders.  Having a very lovely time.

2.  The whole concept of this sort of conference intrigues me.  I just spent a year  helping get some structure for Mount Holyoke Extension and one of the programs we have is a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT).  So, in the last year, I got a crash course in Teacher Education.  Suffice it to say that teacher education is a really odd thing (not the Mount Holyoke program—which is outstanding—but just the whole principle of what we expect of teachers).  Teachers have to take a lot of Education Theory courses, the sort of theory which is here today, and totally changed tomorrow.  Shockingly little content is required.  If you want to know why your child’s high school math teacher seems to know so little mathematics, well, this is why.  So, what the McConnell Center is doing in this conference is providing, free of charge to the participants, some fantastic education in the subject which these teachers are teaching.  This conference came with 600 pages of reading every participant had to do—not light reading, either—Genesis, Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Livy, Cicero, Coke, Smith and lots of important documents surrounding English Common Law and the America Founding.  The whole week is set up like a Liberty Fund conference—lots and lots and lots of discussion.  (Well, they also added two lectures, one each from the two discussion leaders.)  This is, in other words, what Teacher Education should look like. 

3.  The participants in this conference are great.  I wish my kids had these sorts of teachers.  But, it is surely a depressing sign of modern education in America that the teachers here, many of whom have been at other McConnell Center events for teachers, say that they have been unable to convince any of their colleagues to even apply to come to a conference like this one. 

4. The stories these teachers tell of rural schools in Kentucky would be heartbreaking if it weren’t for the fact that Granby, MA isn’t really all that much better.

5. Biggest shock of the conference so far.  One of the teachers here graduated from the same high school in San Jose, California as me, and…she graduated two years after me.  It was a big high school, so we didn’t know each other, but even still…small world.

6. A conference like this is a never ending series of comments which make one think.  To give an example: here is the last thing about which I started wondering.  Do people really want democracy?  Do they like Democracy?  Do they like the give and take of political battle?  Would they just prefer a benevolent dictator?  I am not sure.  Which is not a very comforting thought.

7.  Which leads in an odd way to a book review:  Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage.  This is thought to be Grey’s best novel; I can’t remember if I have ever read one of his novels before, so I don’t know that I have a comparison set.  He wrote Westerns, and if I recall, Colonel Potter liked him a lot (and if you don’t know who Colonel Potter is, well, I feel very, very sorry for you).  Westerns all feel the same to me—yeah I know the plots are different, but for some reason, I don’t feel the difference when reading them.  So, this one had the same rugged Western heroes fighting dastardly villains.  If you have never read a Western before, I would highly recommend this one—everyone should read at least one Western.

8. Imagine putting the characters from Grey’s novel in a discussion about Liberty and the Western Tradition.  Those guys knew what they meant by Liberty.  They had firm views on government and the proper limits thereof.  And yet, they had read none of the books we have read for this conference.  Would I like it if people today had the same beliefs about Liberty and the importance of it that the heroes of a Grey novel had?  Absolutely.  Would I rather live in Utah in the 1890s than in a civilized town in 2013?  Not a chance.  Am I thus wishing for something which cannot be?  The jury is still out on that.  Maybe I’ll figure it out by the end of this conference.

9. Oddest Occurrence of this conference:  Easy.  The hotel bar has a challenge.  They have seven drinks, named for assorted famous people.  You get a card, drink the seven drinks in the order they appear on the card—one per day, but we conference participants got a special dispensation to do the 7 drinks in five days—and at the end you merit the award saying that You Made History.  This is one of those achievements in life which I cannot tell my wife I accomplished while I was at a conference and she was at home with the kids, dog, house, plants, business and finishing up her final project for her graduate certificate program. 

10. So, officially: it is all work and no play here.

11.  Tomorrow night I am going to a ball game.