By Oliver DeMille I was on eBay and Amazon this week looking for a copy of The Complete Madison, a collection of James Madison’s most important writings. I was surprised by what I found. A brand new copy of the book cost $49.99, while a [...]
How to Recognize a Moving Reading and what to Do with It By Oliver DeMille I finished reading the article, and I was deeply moved. It was profound, important, and taught me a number of new things on a topic I had already studied in [...]
By Oliver DeMille Chess, Robert Jordan, and Theoretical Microdynamics It was a brand new freshman class and the first order of business was to help them learn the language of the classics. Most freshmen don’t come with this skill. They know technology very well, [...]
by Oliver & Rachel DeMille We recently posted citing information from an article that raised serious concerns about the new Common Core Standards. And while the information we passed on from the article was technically "factual," on closer scrutiny, it was clearly designed to manipulate [...]
I once read an article by two religious scholars who were very concerned about the qualified and credible scholarship of an individual with what they considered to be a competing religious worldview. It was intriguing to consider the controversy from the point of view of [...]
Note that thinking in metaphor naturally includes literal thinking, but not vice versa. As a society understands metaphor, it understands politics. This is a truism worth chiseling into marble. When the upper class understands metaphor while the masses require literality, freedom declines.
Our modern educational system has taught most of us to focus on the literal, to separate the fields of knowledge, to learn topics as if they are fundamentally detached from each other, and to build areas of expertise and career around disconnected specialties. We are [...]
On October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Stephen Douglas finished his 3-hour address and sat down. Abraham Lincoln stood. He “reminded the audience that it was already 5 pm,” and then told them that it would take him at least as long as Mr. Douglas [...]
I had an epiphany yesterday about woodstoves and warmth--if a little bit more metaphysical than the reading on the thermostat. I was pondering about the struggle I've had of late getting off my personal conveyor belt. Not with TJEd, you'll be glad to know; but I've been in a personal rut and have wondered in vain for several weeks how to break free from my habits.
