Chairman's Blog
More Socratic seminars!
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| Socrates is in green up on the left, in profile. |
In early January I offered to lead some online seminars on early Socratic dialogues, as a small personal response to the lockdown, and (almost to my surprise) this has actually happened. We have now done three of the four proposed seminars, with seven students spread across two groups. It has been fun and I am planning the next set.
The Virus and the Exams
I feel extremely lucky that I was already home-educating my children before the Coronavirus struck. My children's education has not escaped entirely unscathed--their sporting opportunities have been eviscerated--but they have fared as well as anyone and better than most. Teaching and learning have simply carried on, if necessary online. One thing we can't control, however, is the setting of public examinations.
Now we are told that the Government has cancelled this summer’s public examinations in schools, and is consulting on what to do instead. An articleon a blog on the government website explains:
The cancellation of examinations this summer is not because the pandemic makes them impossible to sit … but rather because the unequal impact of the pandemic makes it impossible for them to be fair.
This is for the simple fact that disadvantaged students have had less digital access and schooling, resulting in higher learning loss than their more advantaged peers. They will not be on a level playing field.
As such, qualifications for 2021 can never be an objective measure of performance in the way we are used to, no matter how much we might wish it.
This is a thoroughly disingenuous argument. Certainly the closure of schools has made an “unequal impact”, and this is a catastrophe which will have terrible and long-term consequences.
But it does not follow that exams this summer would not be “an objective measure of performance in the way we are used to.” We are used to disadvantaged children performing poorly in exams, because for whatever reason they have learned less than other children and are less competent in getting their knowledge down on paper. If there were exams this summer, we would see that again, with knobs on, and would learn precisely how much educational damage had been done, and to whom.
This is information the UK Government has decided should not be made available, to universities or employers, to teachers, or to children and their families.
The real argument against having examinations this summer, which emerges eventually from this article, is that while exams usually serve indirectly as a measure of potential, showing who is suited to further studies or jobs, this time they will fail to detect the potential in those children who have suffered most from the closure of schools.
This argument is easier to sympathize with. It is certainly unfair, and a tragic waste, when children’s educational prospects are blighted by factors beyond their control. However, there remains a problem. While universities and employers certainly want to know about potential, there is simply no way of telling what people will do in the future except by reference to what they have done in the past. Candidates for demanding degree courses who have excelled at demanding courses of study at school have demonstrated, insofar as it is possible to demonstrate, that they are equal to the challenge. A certificate of potential based solely on wishful thinking about what young people could do if they put their minds to it will obviously have no credibility.
Such certificates may be where we are heading, and they have the further advantages, for educational progressives, of enabling schools and examiners to make up for all the disadvantages which children have endured. It could be a woke paradise, indeed, with people ranked, not according to achievement, but according to their place in the hierarchy of victimhood.
At the same time it would render unnecessary any actual teaching.Progressive teachers who hate giving children information, or training them in any testable skills, would no doubt welcome this possibility.
This approach also tends to see education as a competition where every winner creates a loser, without regard for the overall level of attainment. In this spirit the Portuguese government recently forbadeprivate schools from offering online lessons, to prevent their pupils from getting too far ahead of children in state schools. This suggests that society as a whole does not benefit from people being educated. In that case, why bother with schools at all?
Oh I was forgetting: schools would still have a rolein undermining parent’s values and as child-care for mothers forced to work outside the home.
But a good education does benefit children. The knowledge, skills, and study-habits formed over years of demanding study makes them better able to tackle further studies or jobs. In other words, a child’s potential is not fixed at birth. Good education increases a child’s potential, and poor education limits it. It doesn’t matter what your genes are, if you have no relevant knowledge or skills you would not cope with a degree course in astrophysics, and letting you do it because of your “potential” would simply waste your time as well as everyone else’s.
Again, education is not a zero-sum undertaking. There may be a fixed number of university places, in a given year, but there aren't a fixed number of job opportunities: a better educated population is more economically productive. Again, education is not just about making money. Children are benefitted by education because it gives them an intellectual formation: it makes them educated adults, able to understand, articulate, and engage with ideas.
What is needed in this crisis is not for teachers to give up on education more than ever, but to make up for lost time. The Institute of Fiscal Studies estimatesthat children at school this year will end up £40,000 worse-off over their lifetimes as a result of the disruption to their education. They propose a raft of initiatives to address the problem by teaching them: in summer schools, for example. Giving them certificates of the exam results they mighthave achieved in other circumstances won’t help: catching up on learning might.
Support the Latin Mass Society
The government wants to recruit children to spy on their parents
The U.K.’s Conservative Party government was elected in 2019 on a wave of revulsion at the patronizing progressivism of the political elite, which was doing its best to frustrate the implementation of the result of the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union (EU), and condemned patriotic voters as “low information” and racist.
This government has now finally implemented our departure from the EU, “Brexit”, but in many parts of the establishment the old elite are clearly still very much in charge. The government’s attitude to the family, the natural, basic unit of society, is starkly revealed by a proposed law they wish to ram through Parliament, despite it being once already defeated by the House of Lords. The Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill, due to be considered in the House of Lords in February, allows for the recruitment of children of 16 and 17 years old to spy on their parents, and at the same time allow them to break the law in doing so. The Daily Telegraph reports:
Covert child agents can break the law if it means they will be able to glean information that could prevent or detect crime, protect public health, safety, or national security or help collect taxes, says the guidance, quietly laid by the government this month.
But it’s ok, we are told, because this will only be done if any one of twenty different state agencies, who are given this power, takes the view that it is justified by “exceptional circumstances.”
Read it all there.
Younger, conservative priests attacked again: by Fr James Martin
Me on LifeSite. Fr James Martin, who retweeted the article I discuss, is even more annoyed now than he was before. However, since I quoted his tweet in full I can hardly be accused of misquoting him.
Fr. James Martin, SJ, has condemned younger, more conservative priests, linking to a National Catholic Reporter article that uses a parish’s experience as a jumping-off point to criticize a whole generation who are strongly motivated to oppose abortion, who are “active” and want to “evangelize,” who like Latin and incense, and — horror! — who read LifeSiteNews.
Fr. Martin commented as he re-tweets the article: “Essential reading: These are not isolated incidents and part of a growing trend in the church, leaving parishioners feeling angry and isolated. Essentially the rejection of much of Vatican II by younger priests, this phenomenon has flown under the radar.”
"I cannot tell you how many people have told me of experiences like this: parish councils disbanded, women removed from positions of leadership, parishioners being told they're "bad Catholics," after recently ordained priests decided to remake the parish in their image."
The trade in babies must stop
The public were recently treated to a recordingof a discussion by the family of Chinese actress, Zheng Shuang, about what to do about two babies which she had arranged to be born by American surrogate mothers. The babies arrived, awkwardly, after she had split up from her boyfriend, the babies’ biological father. The recording was released in the context of a bitter dispute between them and the father.
It’s not clear why Zheng, who is 29 and donated the eggs, wanted to employ other women’s wombs for these pregnancies. Perhaps she has some health reason, or perhaps it was to avoid disrupting her career. After the couple’s split, Zheng and her family have appeared to regard the infants as nothing but an embarrassing inconvenience. Interestingly, surrogacy is illegal in China, and the affair has not gone down well in the Chinese press. Zheng has also been dropped as the Chinese advertising face of the luxury clothing brand, Prada.
There are of course plenty of minor celebrities, and ordinary people too, whose romantic failures have left small children high and dry. Still, however foolish the earlier behaviour may have been, the maternal bond is generally still strong, and grandparents too tend to feel they have something at stake and frequently step in to help pick up the pieces. Those who pay for surrogates to bear children for them, like the Zheng family, by contrast often seem to feel no connection with the children when things go wrong.
Find me on Gab: @LMSChairman
'Transjacking' women's sports
My latest on LifeSite
I thought I spotted some signs of common-sense returning to the world of sport a few weeks ago, but the President of the United States can, up to a point, create the political weather, and Joe Biden’s lead on allowing transexuals to compete as whatever sex they choose now makes my optimism seem premature. On the plus side, I have now learned a new word to describe this phenomenon: “transjacking.”
The mother-and-baby homes: fact and fiction
On October 30th the Irish government released a major report into the much-criticized ‘Mother and Baby Homes’ run by Catholic religious sisters. These looked after women who had children out of wedlock who, in the first half of the 20thcentury, faced severe social sanctions in Irish society. When their families did not want to support them, these religious sisters did: and worked to find homes for the children, if the mothers wished to have them adopted, and set the women back on their feet in terms of employment.
Except that isn’t the narrative the mainstream media, including in Ireland itself, have been setting out. According to them, these institutions were little short of torture chambers for abuse and oppression. The Irish Government and the Archbishop of Dublin have offered public apologies. So, what is the truth?
Read the whole thing there.
More online Latin: and New Testament Greek
Don't miss out on the chance to start or improve your Latin and Patristic/ New Testament Greek with unthreatening online classes.
CHRISTIAN GREEK & LATIN Lenten courses
- New Testament Greek for beginners and intermediates
- Post‑beginners Latin
- The Language of the Latin Mass :
- Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I) and the commentarial tradition from Ambrose to Almar — 50% subsidies for Priests, seminarians and religious
C
ontact matthewjaspencer@yahoo.com“Ardor mihi inerat ut scirem quid priores auctores haberent in corde, qui nostra officia statuerunt”
Living Greek & Latin for the World Today January 19, 2021
GREEK COURSE 1 (22 Feb ‑ 19 March 2021)
Greek Alphabet and very basic grammar for beginners
Plus Greek Course2 (19th April to 14th May 2021): Intermediate Patristics and New Testament Greek Grammar:
8 weeks total : 2 hours weekly, consisting of two one-hour sessions, with a half-hour break in between, leading to possible participation in a six‑day residential Latin Mass Society Course (in August) £400 for 8 weeks of instruction and small-group work (reduced to £300 if only one course is taken) . No previous Ancient Greek is required
NEW: Post-Beginners Latin Course (19 April - 14 May 2021).
4 weeks. £240 per person for 2 hours per week. If you have taken already Beginners’ Latin, then come along for four weeks of Psalms reading and selections from the saints in order to begin consolidating your knowledge of formal grammar, including word ending changes and sentence structure
The Language of the Latin Mass 8 Weeks (22 February ‑ 19 March 2021, and 19 April ‑ 14 May 2021)
For Seminarians, Priests, Religious, 50% subsidised; and interested laypersons; two one hour sessions, on separate occasions, per week).
£600 per person but after generous Latin Mass Society subsidy this is reduced by 50% for priests etc. Connected to England and Wales by residency or background (PLEASE SEE NOTE* below).
About Me
I read Classics as an undergraduate at Oxford (MA conferred 2007) and later did further graduate study in ancient Indian languages also at Oxford. I also hold Master’s degrees in the History of Christianity and, most recently, in Philosophy. I have published one book on the monastic life of Mount Athos and am working on a second as well as occasionally publishing on ancient Indo‑European language. I am passionate about reading and teaching different forms of ancient language and do not believe these languages, or the texts written in them, are dead. They speak to modern concerns, needs and faith.
About the courses
Christian Greek and Latin runs throughout the year, in small groups. If you already know some of the language we are studying then we will build up quickly in a smooth progression to get you reading real texts from the Christian heritage. If you are new to ancient language then we will still take the same broad path but with additional assistance as required which will help you to quickly connect with the main learning route. The lessons are encounters with the language as it was written and as it has been valued for centuries.
Homework and rote‑learning need not be a significant part of these encounters — although some students do prefer these age‑old methods and they will find themselves looked after in that regard. Primarily, we are all language users, have all learned languages before. This experience will really be no different. You will quickly be reading and, I hope and would expect, enjoying Latin and Greek. We will meet, in groups of no more than four or five, for two hours a week . There will not need to be formal preparation for most classes (except for example while learning a new alphabet) but everyone will be free to read and learn between times if they choose. Plenty of hints will be provided about this!
Why ancient languages?
In a world of uncertainty our roots anchor us. For the Catholic Christian, Latin and Greek, along with Hebrew of course, as well as a range of other languages (for example Coptic) together form one of the most significant roots that allows us to draw nearer to the heart of the thought‑world of faith. The fresh experience of reading an author like Augustine, encountering him in his own language, is like none other. These courses are designed to promote such a direct encounter and to do so quickly. Whether your interest is devotional or related to theological study – or if you just want to read some good books – the Christian Greek and Latin courses are for you. We meet online in small groups throughout the year, with some seasonal variation. ‘‘Graduates’’ of one may go on to other courses, as they choose, but doing the Beginners class is not always essential, particularly if you already have extensive background in the Latin language, or a particularly intuitive grasp of language matters.
* The regular price (e.g. for interested and qualified laypersons) is £600 for the ‘‘Latin Mass” course. But please see the following.
(The course requires some prior experience of Latin and will be a more formal introduction to the grammar of the language than the Beginners’ course, on which it builds.)
NOTE FROM THE LMS: The Latin Mass Society has agreed to pay half the fee of clergy and seminarians, as well as religious who are either based in or hail from England and Wales. Simply sign up with the course provider, and your details will be passed on to the society who will pay the provider (Matthew Spencer) on your behalf. Please pay all remaining fees (50% of the regular price of £600) directly to him according to his usual arrangements (by bank transfer or, if preferred, via PayPal transaction).
Clergy from and in other countries are encouraged to ask their local Una Voce associations for help if they need it: Una Voce Scotland, Latin Mass Society of Ireland, Una Voce America, Latin Mass Society of Australia. Latin Mass Society (Ecclesia Dei) New Zealand, etc..
The Demographics of the Traditional Mass
I have demonstrated that the association between the EF and young people and families is neither a myth nor something limited to certain countries. Most Catholics have never encountered the EF, but of those who do, mostly by chance, the ones who make it their preferred Form of Mass are disproportionately young, and include a disproportionate number of families with small children. The presence of numerous children at the typical EF celebration can be confirmed, indeed, by anyone willing to set foot in one, provided it is celebrated in a reasonably family-friendly time and place, and is reasonably well-established.
The place of migrants, and in general of people of mixed cultural and linguistic backgrounds, at the EF, can be seen, naturally, only in places where the local population includes them. Nevertheless it is very evident in cities such as London, and as indicated in the statements quoted above, can be found in many countries.
Easiest of all to confirm is the presence of men at the EF. With Ordinary Form congregations in many places being increasingly dominated by older women, the ability of the EF to retain at least equal numbers of men, as well as young people and those bringing up children, is of no small significance.