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CrunchyMom
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| Posted: May 17 2012 at 8:22am | IP Logged
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"The Map of Human Character" by Will Durant
Quote:
| Therefore I feel that we of this generation give too much time to news about the transient present, too little to the living past. We are choked with news, and starved of history. We know a thousand items about the day or yesterday, we learn the events and troubles and heartbreaks of a hundred peoples, the policies and pretensions of a dozen capitals, the victories and defeats of causes, armies, athletic teams. But how, without history, can we understand these events, discriminate their significance, sift out the large from the small, see the basic currents underlying surface movements and changes, and foresee the result sufficiently to guard against fatal error or the souring of unreasonable hopes? |
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Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
My Symphony
[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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stellamaris
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| Posted: May 18 2012 at 7:08am | IP Logged
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Thank you for sharing this profound quote. The influence of media on today's culture is so negative, and yet resisting it is so difficult. It plays upon our worst failings--gossip, fear, lust, sloth. It gives us "entertainment" instead of life, factoids in place of knowledge, and reactions in lieu of considered analysis. Yet, it's like stopping a tidal wave trying to combat the flood of this impoverished culture into our families.
This has been on my mind a lot recently.
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Caroline
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CrunchyMom
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| Posted: May 18 2012 at 7:19am | IP Logged
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I thought the whole article was inspiring, sort of reinforcing Charlotte Mason's views on history as the spine for all other studies. I could quote the whole essay, really!
It opens with this
Quote:
“History” said Henry Ford, “is bunk.” As one who has written history for twenty-five years, and studied it for forty-five, I should largely agree with the great engineer who put half the world on wheels. History as studied in schools – history as a dreary succession of dates and kings, of politics and wars, of the rise and fall of states – this kind of history is verily a weariness of the flesh, stale and flat and unprofitable. No wonder so few students in school are drawn to it; no wonder so few of us learn any lessons from the past.
But history as man’s rise from savagery to civilization – history as the record of the lasting contributions made to man’s knowledge, wisdom, arts, morals, manners, skills – history as a laboratory rich in a hundred thousand experiments in economics, religion, literature, science, and government – history as our roots and our illumination, as the road by which we came and the only light that can clarify the present and guide us into the future – that kind of history is not “bunk;” it is, as Napoleon said on St. Helena, “the only true philosophy and the only true psychology.” Other studies may tell us how man might behave, or how he should behave; history tells us how he has behaved for six thousand years. |
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It just affirms what we're doing when we embrace a CM curriculum centered on **LIVING** history 
What's more, and one reason I found the original quote so profound, it was written in 1946!!! Just imagine what that author would be saying regarding education and saturation of information in our current culture contrasted with the knowledge necessary to appropriately discern its significance and understand it 
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Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
My Symphony
[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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4Real Forums : Across Time and Place
Topic: The Map of Human Character
