Careful wishes

A significant victory for teachers - Huzzah! - but some caveats:

In the preamble of Bookwarm Games Ep 3: My haunting melody
And some way into the new Classical Conversation (link below)--

To sum up another way: teachers are getting what they asked for and continuing to complain--saying we can’t teach because kids are coming to school with so many problems from home, society--but then schools turn into therapy centers and food banks and social work offices rather than communities of learning, more and more the more the very resources that teachers demand, that students need, are provided there. Which is a great and tragic irony, but perhaps some of us are starting to cotton on. What then? Bifurcate the school between haves and have-nots, contributing to an ever-widening gap? Capitulate entirely and give up the pretense of public education for public welfare, day-care, health-ditto--or prison by another name? Or stand firm and set high expectations and do the impossible work to give kids both the material and emotional and intellectual and probably spiritual supports to rise to them, which may not be within any human being’s power, much less a public school teacher instructed in curriculum development and union rights but hardly having read a book, never having time to. But then again which may be, or so we believe, and so we rise to it ourselves, following the guide sent by Beatrice in the dark wood and down before back up...

What follows is a lengthy comment/addendum to the Classical Conversation video. I thought I better put it here, too--

So I meant to bring this up even though it would be a pretty big tangent, but I was flagging there, fighting the spring forward and the hungry katzen, and it slipped my mind--

Spoilers ahead for any who've not read what is far and away the best fantasy series by a living author, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. If that includes you, then stop reading this and go read that now, shame on you! :)

A major theme there, especially in the third book, is the death of God. It's handled exquisitely in the story, though Pullman makes much of the provocative potential of the topic in his interviews and public statements to garner attention and sell books, and good for him! Much more could be said about this, of course, and I intend to be one of the ones to say it one of these days--it's one of those imaginary courses I most look forward to after EarthBound--but to cut to the chase for now: on the last page of the book Lyra and her daemon are talking. Pan first:

 "...But there was something else."

"I remember. He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn't live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place."

"He said we had to build something..."

"That's why we needed our full life, Pan. We would have gone [...]"

"Yes. Of course! [...]"

"But then we wouldn't have been able to build it. No one could if they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we've got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we'll build..."

Her hands were resting on his glossy fur. Somewhere in the garden a nightingale was singing [...it's such a beautiful passage that follows here but I cut it for brevity's sake, and to forfend the worst of the spoilin'...]

"And then what?" said her daemon sleepily. "Build what?"

"The Republic of Heaven," said Lyra.

--So, that's how the story ends. It's up to us. It's not primarily a metaphysical claim, as I think it was when Nietzsche used it, "God is dead," echoing Plutarch's "The great god Pan is dead"--though it is that, too, certainly, I think it is compatible with some sort of metaphysical belief in God and an afterlife so long as that's understood the way a theologian like Oscar Romero understands it--he uses the same language about building, but keeps the phrase Kingdom, of course (I'm afraid I only borrowed the book and can't supply a quote or exact reference)--but that is all very deep to wade into now. It's more pragmatic here. "Live as if" is a very significant phrase here, echoing language in Plato's Meno as well as in Pullman's best essay, in my opinion: http://www.philip-pullman.com/cm-content/pdf/miss_goddards_grave.pdf

As I just texted in our esoteric thread, with added footnotes: Hmm yes always got to contrariwise things a la SK and his pseudonyms (http://newschoolnotes.blogspot.com/2018/02/this-years-read-pluripotent-kierkegaard.html). I feel the dominance hierarchy only means anything if you remember that bit about who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+18%3A1-4&version=NIV;KJV and http://biblehub.com/matthew/23-11.htm, or the disciples racing to the empty tomb where the women were already there first). As MLK jr put it: everyone can be great because everyone can serve (https://www.cityyear.org/everybody-can-be-great)

Whew!