Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"[Aeschylus'] framework is not the story, but this conception [of justice]. Those bits of the story which does not want...he throws away" - cf Shakespeare

"This Heraclitan philosophy had a profound influence on Plato" - did Plato import, invent the Soul to have something knowable about a person?

"The sharp distinction distinction which the Christian and Oriental world has normally drawn between the body and the soul...was foreign to the Greek at least until the time of Socrates and Plato"

"We have words like this in English...but in Greek this refusal to specialize the meaning is habitual" - I wonder if it is: English has an astonishingly large vocabulary; Hungarian is smaller, but it uses its extensive case system to refine meaning. Where does Greek stand?

"Occidental man, beginning with the Greeks, has never been able to leave things alone. He must inquire, find out, improve, progress: and Progress broke the polis."

"It is a matter of no surprise if many simple Athenians thought the treachery of Alcibiades and the oligarchic fury of Critias and his crew were the direct result of Socrates teaching." - apart from the qualification of 'simple' Kitto is arguing here the Athenians were right to condemn Socrates. From a Conservative perspective, he's right.

"...it is not that Athenians were living more on slavery, but that they were living more on the state." - similar to the national gentry of Hungary before Trianon.

"let [the Briton] reflect on the time-using occupations that we follow that [the Greek] did not - reading books and newspapers...mowing the lawn - grass being, in our climate, one of the bitterest enemies of social and intellectual life" - climate is destiny

"...for if the Greek was not within a day's walk of his political centre, then his life was something less than the life of a real man." - transportation builds the state?

"...the perennial Homer, who taught that habit of mind - essentially aristocratic, in whatever class of society it may be found - which puts quality before quantity, noble struggle before mere achievement, and honour before opulence" - this conception of 'aristocratic' has been so abused by history we should leave it with Homer.

"...the Athenians had some idea that the common good was more important than party advantage - being perhaps in this respect, if in no other, something like the British race." - party, polis, race: it's not how many are included in the magic circle, it's really how those outside are treated by those within.

"...unless our standards of civilization are comfort and contraptions, Athens from (say) 480 to 380 was clearly the most civilized society that has yet existed." - and if our standards of civilization are based on the opinions and behaviour of most citizens rather than the achievements of a few? I think the society that appreciates Socrates is more civilized than the one that puts him to death.

"The Greeks had no doctrinal religion or church; they did not even have what we think of as a satisfactory substitute, a Minister of Education; the polis instructed the citizens in their moral and social duties through the Laws." - Serious; Satire; Serious. I like his style.

"...political history must be kept in its place when it is writing about a people: it is a framework perhaps, it is one expression of a people's character, and it is, for good or ill, one of the people's achievements: it is not the whole story" - but nor it language and literature.

"The difference is this; we expect our state to be quite indifferent to 'the English way of life - indeed, the idea that the State should actively try to promote it would fill most of us with alarm" - why Anglo-Saxonism could never settle in Europe?

"...that [The Comman Man] will still be weak, and the gods strong and incalculable; that violence and recklessness will still lead to disaster, and that this will fall on the innocent as well as on the guilty. The Greeks were fortunate in possessing Homer, and wise in using him as they did." - I liked it when Conservatives used to sound like this.

"Above all there was no coal. The simple fact that no ancient civilization had coal has not, I think been sufficiently considered by social historians" - they had steam engines but not steam power.

"The great differences between and Roman civilization must be due largely to the fact that the Latins, unlike the Hellenes, did not find the old culture of the southeastern Mediterranean well established in the peninsula they invaded: the Appenines had been too much of a barrier." - Carthage?

"The mind of a people is expressed perhaps more immediately in the structure of its language than in anything else it makes, but in all Greek work we shall find this firm grasp of the idea, and its expression in clear and economical form." - Whorf-Sapir?

"That which distills, preserves and then enlarges the experience of a people is Literature. Before the Greeks, the Hebrews had created religious poetry, love poetry, and the religious poetry and oratory of the Prophets, but literature in all its other forms (except the novel) was created and perfected by the Greeks."

"Schools work hard to transmit to children certain other beliefs and attitudes, perhaps without even being aware what they are, or that they are doing it." - Well, teachers do. John Holt included. It's only a problem if these attitudes are too uniform, or children are restricted in the number of teachers who teach them.

"People may often have had to decide which of a number of applicants they would employ or promote, but they did not decide on the basis of diploma's and school transcripts, because there were none" - diplomas help employers make that decision: they want them. In turn the candidate with a diploma is in a stronger position over the candidate without, they want them too. As a teacher, I don't want the responsibility.

"since we cannot at the same time and in same place be in the jail business and in the learning business, we must get oourselves out of the jail business" - learning (at least not to make the same mistake) is an essential part of the prison experience, the difference between that and the school experience is the ratio of learning to jail.

"To ask or expect the schools...given our present understanding of education, to be innovative and imaginative...seems to be asking for the impossible" - perhaps we should be working on our understanding of education rather than condemning schools.

"To go on talking about the sounds of single letters is, with very few exceptions, the worst thing we can do for the children we are trying to help." - a cheap shot, can't think he has thought about this.There is a problem with English in this, but not one I've ever seen a child blocked by. In any case the distinctions between vowel and consonant, and digraphs etc. follow quickly on.

"...in three critical respects [Freire's] 'schools' were altogether different...they were not compulsory...the neither required nor gave any credentials...they did not lock the student into a prescribed sequence of learning determined in advance." - how much are these constraints a consequence of schools and teachers themselves, and how much a consequence of the political economy schools operate in?

"Men learned as they worked, and the lives of everyone on board ship constantly depended on both the work and the learning being done well...This seems to me the model of a sensible educational system for a poor community, a poor minority group, or a poor nation." - Yep, fewer schools, more war - that'll motivate them!

"- in fact, the waves you are familiar with on oceans and lakes are technically called gravity waves" - Wow! I had always imagined that 'gravity waves' were waves in the gravity field around a mass.

"How much freedom do we have in shaping our destiny, whether collectively or individually. At a detailed, high resolution level, we may have great freedom in determining events into the near future, but at course-grained, bigger picture where we deal with very long timescales life my be more deterministic than we think" - is he equivocating here between 'Life' and 'a life'?

"Hence the expensiveness of schools. They are expensive because they are wasteful and unproductive." I suspect that any parent they suddenly became responsible for educating their own children as a result of Covid would agree that schools offer astonishing value for money.