An Educational Reboot at 25; Beginning a Classical Education after College

Today is July 4th, Independence Day, the day we celebrate our liberty and it is also the day that I, at nearly 26, having a college degree, and a job as a lumberjack* am starting over with my education. I have always wished I had a liberal classical education, the education meant for a free citizen of a free country and now I am going to do something about it.

I was homeschooled for most of my basic education. Though I did have to study algebra and a few other subjects which were of little or no interest to me at the time, my basic education was very informal. It was this informality which allowed me to develop a love of learning and especially of reading, I only read books which were of interest to me. This informality with its few requirements was a bed of soil in which to spread the roots of the mind and the resources made available to me(lots of books, willing parents, the infantile internet, etc.) proved to be good mental nutrients. However, this informality also had its drawbacks, the greatest of which was that I was not formally educated; a thing is itself and is not not itself, informal education is not formal education.

I have always believed, along with my parents that the end of education is mental, personal, even virtuous, and not economic, nor practical. That is to say that education is about developing the person and especially the mind to its greatest possible extent, not about getting a job. I have a job; I cut down trees. By most current standards I am highly educated having a college degree and I plan to continue this education with a PhD. I recently realized however, that even after earning a PhD, I would feel that there was a hole in my education because I had never studied the trivium, the three basic subjects of a formal classical education; grammar (Latin grammar, that is), logic, and rhetoric. I have been out of college for over a year and I have a year or so before I begin graduate studies; I’m going to fill that hole. I’m going back to high school.

*Technically I am not a lumberjack because the trees I cut down are generally in neighborhoods, dead, and of little value as lumber but, lumberjack is much easier to say and conveys the basic idea.


From: JWKraft.com 

What is an Unhealthy Economy?

What does it mean to say the economy is unhealthy? Essentially, an unhealthy economy is one in which there is not enough money circulating. A healthy economy is like a lake with a river running through it; the river keeps things fresh and active. When the river dries up, the water in the lake is no longer circulating and it grows stagnent. The plants and fish eventually die and the water gets worse. This is like an unhealthy economy.

When the economy is down the basic problem is that there is not enough money moving around. There may be enough money but people are not spending it freely enough. If one day everyone were to close their bank accounts and burry all their money in coffee cans the economy would come to a grinding halt; that is essentially what happens (albeit in less dramatic fashion) when the economy slows down.

If a large enough group of people guard all their money and burry it in coffee cans then they are not buying shoes. If they are not buying shoes then the shoe store has to lay off its employees and eventually close. If the shoe store closes then the shoe factory will close and layoff its employees. If the shoes factory closes then the leather and rubber companies will close down and layoff their employees. The situation spirals out of control now because all these laid off employees are no longer getting a paycheck and so are no loger buying products and that is even less money in circulation. Less and less money is circulating and more and more companies are forced to lay off employees and close down. The problem is that there is not enough money circulating.

In the days immediately following the September 11th attacks the American people were shocked, scared, and grieving; they stayed at home as much as possible. The economy took a hit because people stopped spending money. President Bush addressed the American people on tv and essentially told them that it was their patriotic duty to go shopping; they listened and economic disaster was averted.

An unhealthy economy is one in which money is not circulating enough. How to cure an unhealthy economy is a question for a future post.

From: JWKraft.com