Blog Break

We will be taking a break from our blog because our daughter will be having the first of her surgeries down in California this week. Please keep us in your prayers. If you'd like to send her a card or words of encouragement, please visit her caring bridge site above, and bless you.

- P.S. We're back and thank you for your prayers. Her surgery was successful and she recovered much more quickly than we anticipated. Soli Deo Gloria!

The Fantastic Imagination

We have been enjoying George Macdonald's Princess and Curdie stories. Here is an excerpt from his wonderful essay on The Fantastic Imagination:

"One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is a layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time things that came from thoughts beyond his own."

There are certainly many sublime moments in George Macdonald's books, and their highest moments have nothing to do with his writing ability, which is quite cumbersome at times.

For the discovery of George MacDonald, I have to thank C.S. Lewis, who said he had always considered GM his master.

Princess and the Goblins at Google Books

Classical, Modern, and Discovery-Based Science

A classical education has much to contribute to science teaching, particularly with showing students how science discoveries are made - science should not be taught as a disembodied list of facts to be memorized. Understanding science in its historical context, provides a more realistic view of how science can be fallible, how can be advanced by the efforts of individual men and women with their own personal motivations, and how different problems can be discovered and solved with the processes of close observation, testing, analysis, and communication with colleagues.

A great historical example of a classical approach to science is Faraday's Observation of a Candle series of lectures. These can be read here. This series of lectures combined so many elements of good science teaching: closer inspection of every day phenomena, a deeper exploration of facts, a thorough examination of scientific assumptions, and a testing of hypotheses. Currently there is great interest in discovery-based learning, but as it is equally important not to stamp out student-led inquiry and curiosity, it is important not to withold facts and technical information that will allow greater complexity in students' scientific thinking.

Last month, I did some science experiments at home with the kids because both were beginning to study the periodic table (pH for hydrogen). The text they were using didn't provide any historical content for why the red cabbaged could be used as an acid-base indicator, so with a little digging, we all were able to discover how the interest in acids and bases came about, how the color changes were important the textile industry, and how research into some of these color-changing substances is important for today and possibly even more for the future.

At The Origins of Acids and Alkalis, we learned that ancient Egyptians and Greeks identified different substances on the basis of taste. Vinegar was sour (acid). Alkalis came from the Arabic word al-qaliy which stood for a slippery substance left over after burning.

But the interest in acids really took off when French fabric dyers in the 16th century discovered that acids created colors that were much more vibrant (we thought of our Easter egg dyeing with vinegar).

There are many take off points for this study. Some of you may like to explore natural dyes at a site like Pioneer Thinking and Natural Dyes. We also talked about current ideas about possible health benefits of the anthocyanins and examined the structure of anthocyanins. We also tested various substances around the house, and found that most of their predictions about acids and bases were correct. But there was one exception that seemed to stump us. The kids dissolved a praline in some water, and had expected it to be a bit acidic (doesn't candy dissolve your teeth?). With a little bit of research into this unexpected result, they learned that the acid that makes dental cavities is caused by sugar because the sugar makes bacteria sticky to teeth, and it's the acid produced by the bacteria that makes holes. So what kind of science is all this? Classical-Modern-Discovery-Based Science, I think.

Yarn Picture

The Fall of Ancient Greek Civilization - The Peloponnesian War

Our son's midterm paper topic (Schola Tutorials) over Christmas break was Who Should Have Won the Peloponnesian War. I confess to knowing very little about the Peloponnesian War, but the topic piqued my curiosity as I remember from some of my friends at Harvard that Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War was mandatory reading for Gov 40, the killer pregov / prelaw course (like the premeds' Organic Chem). So why should this old book be required reading?

We've been wending our way through The Baldwin Project's The Story of the Greeks and I came to realize that there is a lot to learn from this War for any citizen of a democratic country. Athens should have won. It wasted its talented leaders and could not act decisively to unite the different dissenting voices within its city states. Human vices of arrogance, greed, and cruelty, doomed much more than who would rule Greece. I was surprised to learn that most of my son's online classmates felt that the Spartans should have won the war. Certainly this could make for a good discussion or debate over the dinner table!

An excerpt from Gilbert Highet's The Classical Tradition:

"It is not always understood nowadays how noble and how widespread Greco-Roman Civilization was, how it kept Europe, the Middle East, and northern AFrica peaceful, cultured, prosperous, and happy for centuries, and how much was lost when the savages and invaders broke in upon it...We are so accustomed to contemplating the spectacle of human progress that we assume modern culture to be better than anything that preceded it. We forget also how able and how willing men are to reverse the movement of progress: how many forces of barbarism remain, like vocanoes in a cultivated island, still powerfully alive, capable not only of injuring civilization but of putting a burning desert in its place."

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For those of you interested in samples of middle school writing, here's our son's short position paper on the War:

Athens should have won the Peloponnesian War.

The Athenians' loss in the Peloponnesian War meant a loss of Greek independence and setback for the principles of democracy throughout the Western world. At the start of the war, Athens had good resources, a superior navy, and a good general in Pericles. Pericles' war strategy was to protect his population behind the Long Walls. Sparta attacked the countryside, but could not significantly harm the people or the supply lines to Athens, which were protected by their fleet. Athens was defeated mainly due to a plague that struck, killing almost one-third of the population, including Pericles.

Sparta ended up winning the war, but ruled poorly over Greece because of poor leaderships and a society that was not oriented toward government during peacetime. Spartan culture emphasized only military strength and denied its citizens individuality and free choice. As a result, Spartan culture had little in the way of the arts or philosophy. Children were taken away from their mothers at age 7 and raised by nurses with little coddling and only simple food. This culture was non-Biblical. Whereas the Bible places importance on the family and the different roles of father, mother, and child, the Spartan culture placed little importance on family, and replaced the family with the state.

As a result of Sparta winning, all the Greek city-states were weakened. As a result, it was easier for Macedonia to conquer them several decades later.

Athens should share some of the blame for losing the Peloponnesian War. Athens went to conquer Sicily and Syracuse, exhausting their navy and army, and making them more vulnerable to defeat. Also, the Athenians had a bad tradition of exiling or killing some of their greatest leaders. Many were so anxious that their leaders would gain too much power and become tyrants that they accused them of crimes that many probably did not commit. Many good leaders may have been killed, exiled, or forced to defect to another country, like Alcibiades.

The Age of Pericles was a time when politics, philosophy, and the arts flourished in Greece. Pericles also created a large number of public works projects that made living easier for the Athenians. If Athens had won the Peloponnesian War, perhaps that age would have continued.

A War Like No Other - NRO
The Plague of Athens
Peloponnesian War Picture