The Teaching Profession

We've got a bit of a dust-up underway with an anonymous writer who has undertaken a spirited defense of the the teaching profession. Only problem is, no one was attacking the teaching profession--just a group of them acting together under union influence.

If you have the time, it's worth reading this longish piece from the NYT magazine on building better teachers. It gives the reader an appreciation of the challenges of modern education and the truly tough row that today's teachers have to hoe.

But I think the anonymous teacher defender pretty much gets it right in one of his or her posts--we are concentrating so much on teachers because society has given up on families. Two trends should be looked to as having contributed to the decline in US education--the ongoing demise of the traditional family (through divorce and illegitimate birth), and the dramatic increase of women in the workforce. The education and socialization of children in our society has been largely contracted out, and we look to today's teachers to pull off what the family was responsible for in decades past. This is not a good strategy for the long-haul.

The Kitten And I At Christmas

Well no, not really. A look inside the parlor of Secretary of War Newton Baker in 1919. The comments in the story from which the photo comes are pretty interesting--especially the extent to which we've become convinced of the perfectability of the Christmas Tree.

Went out yesterday en familie to cut down a beast for ourselves late in the afternoon yesterday, and there were rows and rows of nearly perfect trees--which of course, made the selection difficult as we had to find one that WAS in fact, perfect.

Instead, we got two---one, a small nicely shaped fella--will go, well, I don't really know where. But the big Douglas Fir--'bout a 9 footer--will go in our Christmas parlor--a la Secretary baker.


Once again, HT--Instapundit.