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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.Joe Carillo
Two pathways, two wellsprings to a good education
We have two provocative readings this week pointing to two unconventional pathways and two wellsprings to a good education: learning based on acquiring strong cultural literacy rather than “how-to” skills, and becoming a perfect traveler—“feet firmly on the ground” but “open to almost everything that comes (one’s) way” and with the capacity to give oneself “over to moments of real wonder.”
In “E. D. Hirsh’s Curriculum for Democracy,” an article he wrote for the Autumn 2009 issue of the City Journal, Sol Stern, contributing editor and Manhattan Institute senior fellow, urges the Obama administration in the United States to embrace the unconventional legacy of education thinker E. D. Hirsch, Jr. That legacy is the so-called “Massachusetts miracle,” in which the test scores of Bay State students soared and broke records—a direct consequence of the state’s 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. As envisioned by Hirsch, “The school would be the institution that would transform future citizens into loyal Americans. It would teach common knowledge, virtues, ideals, language, and commitments.”
Read Sol Stern’s “E. D. Hirsh’s Curriculum for Democracy” now!
A different approach to continuing education was the one taken by English novelist W. Somerset Maugham, whom noted novelist and travel writer Pico Iyer describes as the perfect world traveler—“cool, steady and prone to breaking rules.” In an adaptation of his introduction to the forthcoming The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writing of W. Somerset Maugham, which he edited, Iyer says that in an early book Maugham wrote about Spain, he declared that ““It is much better to read books of travel than to travel oneself; he really enjoys foreign lands who never goes abroad.” But Iyer says that Maugham’s strength was “that he would not listen even to his own advice, and was permanently breaking the rules he’d so clearly and logically laid down.”
