[Date Prev][Date Next][Subject Prev][Subject Next][ Date Index][ Subject Index]

Re: Civics (was Re: RE XP or 2000)



Actually, I experienced the intermediate phase in junior high (1972-75).
I had learned grammar including sentence diagrams etc. in elementary
(a.k.a. grammar) school, but every year in junior high
the English teacher started over again explaining what a noun was. 
Fortunately several of the teachers had the sense to see that
I was bored out of my skull and let me go to the library and read.

I think civics classes died after Watergate and the Vietnam War, when
many people realized that a lot of what they had been
taught in civics classes about how the system worked was lies.


Patricia M Godfrey wrote:
Alas, too true, Bob White. Grammar had gone long before. From 1953 to
1958, when I was in High School and first year of college, I sat, as near
to bored as I've ever been, for the first two weeks of every foreign
language course I took (Latin, French, and German), while the
teacher/instructor explained to my classmates (who had never heard of any
of it) the parts of speech and the basic principles of Indo-European
grammar. I often say I'm the last person alive to have learned grammar in
grammar school. And as for some of the people who are calling themselves
copy editors nowadays... Don't get me started.

Harry wrote >

Hmm. If that's so, it would seem that an excess of freedom, or freedom
poorly conceived, could be inimical to true freedom, no? A nice paradox
(using `nice' as Wellington did after Waterloo--in one recension at
least).
Patricia