Sheep and Goats

Category: Homeschooling/Education

  • Endless Grad Students to Propel Evolution

    Endless graduate students propelled by endless grant dollars explore every vestage of evolution theory. No nook is too obscure for someone to make a doctorate out of. All are programmed in the purely material Few thing to break from the mold. All are proclaiming their quest for truth. All equate their decisions to chemical reactions and somehow imagine such chemical reactions can discern “truth.” Not all, I know—that is hyperbolic. But it is the overwhelming trend. Better to hold up a stop sign to a tsunami than to attempt its reversal.

    Whereas, my people, as soon as you hop onboard, they will send you out knocking on doors on the basis that we are in the last days. So I won’t find much evolution commentary in-house. The pickings will be exceedingly lean. I’ll have to track it elsewhere.

    Thing is, if we really are in the last days—and one can easily make a case for it since every day reveals a greater trainwreck of human self-rule than the day before—then knocking on doors is just the ticket. The end is indeed “just around the corner,” even if it has proved to be one heckuva corner. No matter. When the court case is at last closed, the verdict pronounced that human rule aport from God is a disaster, when the books are finally closed on the experiment and it recedes in memory—a thousand plus years from now, will humans once again get it in their heads that self-rule is the way to go? Hopefully, Mark Twain’s words will apply, that a cat which sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. In fact, it won’t sit on a cold one either. Why? Because they all look hot.

    Meanwhile, it’s not entirely unlike when, during the Vietnam War era, I sent my buddy in college a faux form letter as though from the government: “This country has enough” followed by a long list of professions requiring a college degree, of which I put a check mark by the one he had chosen. “What we need now is soldiers! Enlist now, Kevin!” So it is that the Bible think tank, though there be many things to do in life, facilites the door-to-door ministry.

    Though representing a Western field that maintains nothing is more important than “spreading one’s seed,” after which evolution doesn’t give a hoot whether you keep living or not, they have collectively neglected that task to such a degree that their world threatens to collapse. You would think they would focus on why THAT is true. Why has the Western world effectively chosen collective suicide? Isn’t it Nero fiddling while Rome burns to be pretending that their chemically-determined choices have any meaning, much less that they uncover “truth,” when the very society they live in dissipates through lack of child-bearing?

    One might prefer the model of Genesis: Jehovah made the attraction between the sexes very very strong. He did not want to come along one or two thousand years later to a barren planet only to hear Adam say, ‘Oh….yeah….You did say that didn’t you? Sorry. I guess we just plumb forgot. So it is that for thousands of years parents would warn their offspring about premature sex, not always successfully. The young person would creep ever so closer to this tantalizing new force of sexual attraction, as though a spacepod approaching a black hole. Closer and closer they creep. It is so enticing. What is all this fuss from the old people, anyway? Suddenly he is caught in its grip and pulled into a two-mile long strand of spaghetti.

    It’s not the model that prevails these days in the West, at least insofar as bearing children is concerned. Western society ignores the most basic instinct in the world, as though pulling the plug on itself is the noblest aspiration one could attain. It’s not because they don’t understand quantum mechanics that would make them do this, nor why the universe accelerates as it expands, as though having the good sense to stay away from us.

    Only the monied and comfortable atheists can occupy oneself with the ‘how’ questions of evolution, undistracted by Rome burning. Only they, in their own world, can fail to see that it is burning, as they fascinate themselves with a worldview of chance their “evidence” points them to. Only they can be oblivious to how it cuts them off from the hopes and dreams that have historically driven humanity. Long ago (1920), H.G. Wells, who turned atheist over time, observed: “The Darwinian movement took formal Christianity unawares, suddenly. . . . The new biological science was bringing nothing constructive as yet to replace the old moral stand-bys. A real de-moralization ensued.” Then, connecting that attitude with an increased appetite for war manifested in WWI and soon-to-come WWII: “Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth century believed that they prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for Existence, in which the strong and cunning get the better of the weak and confiding. . . . Man, they decided, is a social animal like the Indian hunting dog . . . so it seemed right to them that the big dogs of the human pack should bully and subdue.” [Outline of History]

    They concluded that God was dead. They didn’t disagree with their own conclusion, but they were saddened by it. They knew they had lost a lot. Not so atheist’s next generation! They gleefully saw off the branch upon which they sit, in return for the ecstasy of no one telling them what to do! Our 70-80 years, with nothingness looming beyond, seems to them a great bargain. No matter if it ends in the nursing home with someone (ideally) changing their Depends three times a day! In his time, Ronald Reagan was, arguably, the world’s most influential person. Ten years later, in the throes of Alzheimer’s, he didn’t know who he was. Does this faze the next generation? It doesn’t seem to. For the first time in human history, relative comfort and ease is possible for most of us, provided we play our cards right and aren’t terribly unlucky and live in privileged nations. We can have fine homes, fine cars, cool technology. And that’s good enough for them! What could God possibly add to that?

    Sean Carroll waxes ecstatic over the notion of chance being the driver of our lives, with no sense at all at being cut off adrift. It’s another of his books, a more recent (2020) offering than The Making of the Fittest. This one is entitled A Series of Fortunate Events, the subtitle reading Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You. “Fascinating and exhilarating!” someone chimes in on the cover. Readable though the book is, that won’t be my chime. Mine will be more along the lines of the guillotine joke. For greater sadistic effect, the executioner one day had decided that candidates ought be placed on their backs looking up at the fearsome blade. Twice the machine had inexplicably failed. Twice the prisoners had consequently been released. But as the third candidate was fastened in place, looking up, he exclaimed, “Hey! I think I see what is wrong with the thing!”

    ******  The bookstore

  • Higher Education to Mess with Your Head

    The publications of Jehovah's Witness publications have not had a kind word for higher education. Just recently, the Watchtower study included a paragraph of Marcia, who “was offered a four-year scholarship at a university. But I wanted to pursue spiritual goals.” She didn’t throw caution to the wind. She “chose to attend a technical training school to learn a trade that would support me in my ministry,” and counts it “one of the best decisions I have ever made.” (Feb 2024 Watchtower) It is an example of the article’s title: "Keep Following Jehovah’s Guidance." That’s not really trashing university, of course, but it certainly is not lauding it as the bee’s knees.

    They are not wrong to be leery of the place. Moreover, who else has the guts to dampen it? Most faiths think it an honor to have churches bristling with lettered people. Most faiths say, ‘Christians may have started ‘uneducated and ordinary,’ (Acts 4:13) but look at how they pulled themselves up! Most faiths replace Paul’s encouragement to be a ‘workman, with nothing to be ashamed of’ (2 Timothy 2:15) with ‘a professional—so you don’t have to be ashamed.’ Not many are like the Witnesses, who expect the passage of 1 Corinthians 1:26 to hold just as true today as it did then: “For you see his calling of you, brothers, that there are not many wise in a fleshly way, not many powerful, not many of noble birth.” They don’t care if people sneer at them for it. Train yourself for a skill that is both portable and scalable, they recommend. That way, you have time for the ministry.

    Their caution is validated in the remarks of Great Courses lecturer James Hall, who covers the topic, ‘Philosophy of Religion.’ A university professor himself, he relates how, “I have parents who come to the university perplexed and amazed that young Susie or young Johnny, who has gone off to the university and has come home for that first holiday, isn't the same that they used to be. And all I can do is lower my glasses to the end of my nose and look over my glasses and say, Why did you send them to university in the first place?”

    Got it? The purpose of university is not to accept a student’s childhood values as a given. The purpose is to overhaul them. It’s all agreeable to Hall, who says you send them there “to grow up . . . to be exposed, to expand their horizons, to increase the scale of their life,” with the implicit understanding that he, as faculty member, he, who “lowers his glasses to the end of his nose and looks over those glasses” at the plebian parents, is just the one to do it.

    Now, no problem here with growing up. Who doesn’t want that? Go for it. But, is this the setting in which to do it? It was sex, drugs, rock & roll, and protesting, when I was there–albeit with some learning. Here, Hall sits atop the repository of knowledge that has collectively made the world what it is—and he should be the one to expand those horizons and increase those scales? Only the educated can look upon the trainwreck that is modern society and congratulate themselves on their understanding. Spit back what Hall tells you if you want a passing grade—not necessarily verbatim, but you’d better not stray too far from it. The ‘safest’ correlation to his remarks will be what was said of P.D.Q. Bach, that his music bore a relationship with that of a certain great composer, and the name of that relationship was ‘identity.’ He wasn’t one for plagiarizing, but he did believe in recycling.

    Hall and the Witness organization are in agreement on one thing, though for different reasons. That answer to Hall’s question as to why parents sent their youngsters to university? He continues, “I'm afraid sometimes the only answer is, ‘Well, because that’s what you do,’ or, ‘Well, all of our neighbors were sending their children to university so we figured maybe we [had] better too.’” Going with the crowd, in other words. Hall doesn’t want children to go for this reason. He wants them to purposefully go so he can mess with their heads, expanding them beyond whatever parochial values they absorbed from back home, such as Bible training. The Witness organization doesn’t want them to go because ‘everyone else is doing it,’ either. They’d rather the parents not give Hall and his cohorts their shot; head youngsters off into the full-time ministry instead. For all the furor of ‘anti-cultists,’ it is the university, not the Witness world, in which newbies are cut off 24/7 from all that once stabilized them—a classic technique of ‘brainwashers.’

    You can look like roadkill when you stand against the common stampede. Witness HQ will never stop cautioning about university, I don’t think. They will never recommend liberal arts degrees. They will never stop recommending technical training and trade schools. But they may yield more to the view that secular education is a family decision, not something to be second-guessed by others, much less micro-managed. There is just too much variety in people and circumstances. Maybe that will be on one of those future updates. It may be happening already. A youngster in the congregation went off to college not long ago and nobody had anything to say about it at all; I checked with his mom. Will he evade Hall or even stand up to him? Maybe. Maybe not. But it turns out that Hall has cousins in all walks of life, trying to shoot down biblical values wherever you happen to be.

     

    ******  The bookstore

  • Witnesses and Higher Education—Coming Up on the GB Update List?

    Huh! Ocala invites me on a Bible study he is conducting for about a month. Turns out to be a ‘textbook’ study, exactly what HQ would enact if they wanted to demonstrate one.

    Unprompted, the man said how, in a moment of spiritual desperation, he had got to his knees and prayed. ‘God, if you exist, please—I only seek to be happy.’ Within the hour, Ocala had knocked on his door and made his acquaintance.

    So, I said to Ocala later, ‘Had you prayed for a Bible study?’ He told me he had. ‘I’ve read about these things happening, but it never happened to me,’ he added.

    Ocala asks me at the study if I have anything to add. I put in some remark, something grounded to the theme that does not launch off into another direction, upon which he says, “Thank you for that personal expression.” If the student thinks that a little stilted (he may not), he attributes it to Ocala’s African background. He does not connect it to the mannerisms of the Witness broadcast channel.

    Ocala appeared out of nowhere a year or two ago as a full-blown graduate student on scholarship at the local university. So unusual is this among the congregations that some did not quite know what to make of him. The brother I have dubbed ‘Barnabas,’ in answer to one of his public meeting comments, mentioned his publisher cards had arrived from the home congregation and elders in African. Congregations keep such minimal records. That way, no scam artist can just breeze in and pull the wool over everyone’s eyes (as they can most anywhere else). Since then, Ocala has established himself as solid in every way, now pioneering and a ministerial servant. Few have a more steadfast ministry. He doesn’t overcomplicate things.

    ***

    They’re all rather trivial matters—all these GB updates of late—adjustments to the ministry, changing norms of dress and grooming. Still, they are changes to long-standing policy, so people make a big fuss over them. A brother at our hall, commenting on fast-moving changes we all must adjust to, mentioned “sisters wearing pants,” (did he also mention no ties?) as though aghast that someone had run the chariot into a ditch.

    With several of such updates in a row, people start anticipating the next one. What other thing that we have not done will we start doing? Might it be a lightening up over ‘higher education?’ Not that such has ever been outlawed—how could it be?—but you can find yourself running a gauntlet of peer pressure should you choose to go there. Might there come an underlining that it is a decision of the family head, leave him be to make it, and don’t think everyone else has to put in their two cents on whatever that one decides.

    Witness publications have not had a kind word for higher education. Just this past week, the Watchtower study included a paragraph of Marcia, who “was offered a four-year scholarship at a university. But I wanted to pursue spiritual goals.” She didn’t throw caution to the wind. She “chose to attend a technical training school to learn a trade that would support me in my ministry,” and counts it “one of the best decisions I have ever made.” (Feb 2024 Wt) It is an example of the article’s title: ‘Keep Following Jehovah’s Guidance.’ That’s not really trashing university, of course, but it certainly is not presenting it as the preferred goal.

    They are not wrong to be leery of the place. Moreover, who else has the guts to discourage it? Most faiths think it an honor to have churches bristling with lettered people. Most faiths say, ‘Christians may have started ‘uneducated and ordinary,’ (Acts 4:13) but look at how they pulled themselves up! Most faiths replace Paul’s encouragement to be a ‘workman, with nothing to be ashamed of’ (2 Timothy 2:15) with ‘a professional—so you don’t have to be ashamed.’ Not many are like the Witnesses, who expect the passage of 1 Corinthians 1:26 to hold just as true today as it did then: “For you see his calling of you, brothers, that there are not many wise in a fleshly way, not many powerful, not many of noble birth.” They don’t care if people sneer at them for it. Train yourself for a skill that is both portable and scalable, they recommend. That way, you have time for the ministry.

    Their caution is validated in the remarks of Great Courses lecturer James Hall, who covers the topic, ‘Philosophy of Religion.’ A university professor himself, he relates how, “I have parents who come to the university perplexed and amazed that young Susie or young Johnny, who has gone off to the university and has come home for that first holiday, isn't the same that they used to be. And all I can do is lower my glasses to the end of my nose and look over my glasses and say, Why did you send them to university in the first place?”

    Got it? The purpose of university is not to accept a student’s childhood values as a given. The purpose is to overhaul them. It’s all agreeable to Hall, who says you send them there “to grow up . . . to be exposed, to expand their horizons, to increase the scale of their life,” with the implicit understanding that he, as faculty member, he, who “lowers his glasses to the end of his nose and looks over those glasses” at the plebian parents, is just the one to do it.

    Now, no problem here with growing up. Who doesn’t want that? Go for it. But, is this the setting in which to do it? Here, Hall sits atop the repository of knowledge that has collectively made the world what is—and he should be the one to expand those horizons and increase those scales? Only the educated can look upon the trainwreck that is modern society and congratulate themselves on their understanding. Spit back what Hall tells you if you want a passing grade—not necessarily verbatim, but you’d better not stray too far from it. The ‘safest’ correlation to his remarks will be what was said of P.D.Q. Bach, that his music bore a relationship with that of a certain great composer, and the name of that relationship was ‘identity.’ He wasn’t one for plagiarizing, but he did believe in recycling.

    Ocala doesn’t know anything about this. It is not something he has encountered, or if he has, he weathered it so effortlessly that he does not remember encountering it. In his homeland, he tells me, additional education after primary school is common, common enough that Witness youths encourage and stabilize one another. Some go “off the rails,” (his expression), to be sure, but some go off the rails in any setting. Jobs are scarce where he comes from, he tells me, and employers take full advantage of the fact, reminding their workers at every opportunity that they are easily replaceable. He doesn’t yet know if he will stay in the States or return home upon graduation. He has a quiet confidence about himself and does not appear to be one easy to shove around. But, he is hurt when people think he does what he does ‘because he wants the good life,’ and he tells me sometimes people do think that.

    He did not come straight from African school to the United States for college. He worked secularly in an office for a year. Whereupon, it occurred to him that he might work less overall if he could land a scholarship in the U.S. That he did. He now considers college his full-time job and all he has to do is pass. It is less demanding than his secular life back home and, while attending to it, he is also able to serve Jehovah more fully than he could have back home. As to his landing a scholarship from afar, Yogi Berra advised, “When you see a fork in the road, take it.” They didn’t leave it there for you. They left if, as often as not, to advance their own careers in some way. Take it. As long as you can clear whatever hoops have been laid out for you, take it.

    Hall and the Witness organization are in agreement on one thing, though for different reasons. That answer to Hall’s question as to why parents sent their youngsters to university? He continues, “I'm afraid sometimes the only answer is, ‘Well, because that's what you do,’ or, ‘Well, all of our neighbors were sending their children to university so we figured maybe we [had] better too.’” Going with the crowd, in other words. Hall doesn’t want children to go for this reason. He wants them to purposefully go so he can mess with their heads, expanding them beyond whatever parochial values they absorbed from back home, such as Bible training. The Witness organization doesn’t want them to go because ‘everyone else is doing it,’ either. They’d rather the parents not give Hall and his cohorts their shot; head youngsters off into the full-time ministry instead. For all the furor of ‘anti-cultists,’ it is the university, not the Witness world, in which newbies are cut off 24/7 from all that once stabilized them—a classic technique of ‘brainwashers.’

    You can look like roadkill when you stand against the common stampede. Witness HQ will never stop cautioning about university, I don’t think. They will never recommend liberal arts degrees. They will never stop recommending technical training and trade schools. But they may yield more to the view that secular education is a family decision, not something to be second-guessed by others, much less micro-managed. There is just too much variety in people and circumstances. Maybe that will be on one of those future updates. It may be happening already. Another youngster in the congregation went off to college about the time Ocala arrived and nobody had anything to say about it at all; I checked with his mom. Will he evade Hall or even stand up to him? Maybe. Maybe not. But it turns out that Hall has cousins in all walks of life, trying to shoot down biblical values wherever you happen to be.

     

    ******  The bookstore

  • Be ‘Upbuilding’ Come What May

    Ha! Here is a sis from England who would use the word “upbuilding” liberally in school class assignments. She was much surprised when her teacher would circle it in red, appending ‘This is NOT a word!’ To hear this must have been downbuilding.

    I had a similar experience. A co-working jumped all over me for the word ‘upbuilding’—what did you say? he said, observing there’s no such word. There is now though—check a dictionary and you will find it. Is it a little like ‘irregardless,’ which was also not a word but now grudgingly appears in some dictionaries from sheer usage?  

    And this ‘upbuilding’ is not the sis—a teen in our congregation—whom we spent a Zoom ministry session with, and who related her travails at school. Whoa! She carries herself with confidence and poise, and not a hint of ‘superiority’—even though applied Christianity is such that some will almost automatically take it that way. Several classmates, she said, have made it their “purpose in life” that she should start vaping.

    They think she’s a “goody-two-shoes”—again, her words. But the real zinger was her standing up to her teacher. Upon being singled out before the whole class (many of whom can barely read) for a relative trifle, she got all indignant and called him out on it! “Are you talking back to me?” the teacher said. She replied that she was.

    It ended up with a brief stint for her in the principal’s office. The long and short of it, however, is that now she and the teacher get along fine, and the latter has heightened respect for her.

    And then, of course, there was another teen some time ago, ridiculed by classmates because she would not dress as a skank. “I set the style!” she shot back at them. “You want to be cool—you dress like me!” 

    Though one high schooler, also a while back, was being bullied—really bullied—physically—so he  approached a favorite older elder (now deceased) about the problem. The elder give him good counsel on turning the other cheek and ignoring the bully. It didn’t work. Once again he went to the elder, who took him aside and said, “Well sometimes you just gotta plant them a good one so they don’t come back.” That stratagem did work.

    Ahem—well—it is from the old days. “We used to stack ‘em up like cordwood” said one old-timer of his Kingdom days during the WWII times of persecution. (much to my surprise). I knew the fellow, who also died some years back, but these words were related to me by his grandson. Fisticuffs were apparently not unusual in defending both loved ones, selves, and Kingdom property. The book Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses relates an incident in which an intruder was even shot to death by a brother! Defending one’s property by force was once the norm in society.

    There was another person who thought the video of Olivia kicking back at classmates, presented at the Regional Convention last year, wasn’t very realistic. I was fine with it, but she said she didn’t think they would ridicule her like that.“They’d beat her up in the bathroom” was her verdict.

    You also won’t find me countenancing that fisticuffs elder of a far-removed generation. These days that can get you knifed. Better to ‘beat a bully without using your fists’ if you can.

     

    ******  The bookstore

     

  • How Many Are the Cows?

    Our chum watched the video of Olivia being mocked by classmates. It would never happen that way, she said.  Why not? we asked. Things aren’t that bad?

    They wouldn’t ridicule her like that. They’d beat her up in the bathroom instead, she said.

    I do remember being guest at the home of some friends where the daughter matter-of-factly spoke of how at the school she used to attend girls would attack each other with box-cutters. They liked to sneak up on unsuspecting ones, preferring to disfigure the face.

    We had no idea.

    Not to say this would happen everywhere.. I think it would not. We once lived where there was a gritty school system. Long ago, I wrote of how the departing school superintendent was interviewed by local media about his tenure. This fellow was hailed as a superstar when he arrived, one sure to raise the sinking ship. He left in short order for greener pastures.

    He answered his interviewer with a bewildering set of buzzwords. Not to fear, I wrote. The skilled interpreter of ‘Educatese’ has no difficulty comprehending the underlying message: Don’t expect any changes in your lifetime.

    It was prophetic. Here we are decades later and there have been no changes. Well—that’s not technically correct. Things have gotten worse.  The SEC recently launched an investigation into that District’s internal finances. How often does THAT happen? And the education of the kids? Sigh…Fuhgeddaboudit.

    We didn’t want to leave the area at the time, even though we have since. We figured we’d homeschool the kids. No regrets, though it does put you out of sync with the agencies. Even before school, we went through all the Glenn Doman number cards with our babies, I am convinced to good effect—and even in the event it was not it was fun and took almost no time.

    At one point, following a Doman cue, we asked our infant to pick up the placard that was 57, as opposed to 56 and 58, dots all mixed up with no underlying pattern—the number written on the back so you would know. Instantly he did. But Doman said you can’t do it twice; infants get bored and they will not do it for show. Sure enough, when we tried again, he would not.

    Coincidence? Dunno. It was a one out of three chance, after all, so coincidence is certainly possible.  But he reached for it instantly, with no hesitation at all.

    The point was, in building your baby’s ‘better’ brain (Yikes!—Building Back Better) A8BD1D53-6D86-4E70-B1E7-194A94FA9B1Ethat if you see 3 or 4 cows in the field you instantly read them for their true number, but at some point you must start counting, 1…2…3…4…5…. The idea with the flash cards for an infant’s rapidly expanding brain was that you could push way up that point at which you had to start counting; that it could take in 56 at a glance. Doman’s flash cards went up to 100. 

    Davey-the-Kid went after that system with an almost missionary zeal that embarrassed him later. He was there, all right, at that pricey weeklong seminar in Philly (where I wan’t). ‘How’s field service?’ Ernie asked him over the phone but he replied he hadn’t gone out in service. “How’s the meetings?” Ernie asked but he replied he hadn’t been to any. “Did you pray?” Ernie said in mock exasperation.

    We’re talking about the guy who installed a 3 foot swimming pool in his heated basement so he could teach his baby to swim, another thing that was all the rage. Davey passed away some years ago, but his son is still with us. Come to think of it, if you asked me whether or not the kid can swim, I’d draw a blank.

     

    ******  The bookstore

  • What I Like About Jehovah’s Organization is That Those With the Highest Education Do Not Assume Takeover Rights

    Q: We had a CO visit some time ago and he said that some are getting frustrated with our meetings because they lacked deep food…and explained that the bulk of people responding to the good news were from lands with little education..many struggled with the basics of reading and writing…and our articles were written with them in mind…and told us that for their sake we had to get used to it…and do personal deep study…which is really our own responsibility anyway.

    A: I’ll buy it. That’s who responds to the good news. That is the historical pattern. No reason to think it should change:

    “For you see his calling of you, brothers, that there are not many wise in a fleshly way, not many powerful, not many of noble birth, but God chose the foolish things of the world to put the wise men to shame; and God chose the weak things of the world to put the strong things to shame; and God chose the insignificant things of the world and the things looked down on, the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, so that no one might boast in the sight of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:24-26)

    So for those who have more than the norm of education? They can learn to read a few grade levels below them if they are not too full of themselves—it will be good for them, as they “do personal deep study…which is really our own responsibility anyway.”

    What I like about the truth is that those with educational background do not assume takeover rights, as they do in the greater world. They either self-discipline or have been disciplined by life not to let their educational advantage become a disadvantage—to not let their education puff them up. They do not patronize with: “Okay, you have done well. Amazingly well, really, considering your lack of education. But now the smart people have arrived. We’ll take it from here, thanks very much.”

    They learn their education is a gift that they may bring to the altar, no more valuable than the gifts of others.

     

  • The Graduate Author Who Ran from Success—Where Have You Gone, Mrs Robinson?

    The guy who wrote The Graduate—the book, not the movie—gave away all the money he made from writing it. He bought a house with his one-time movie rights. He gave it away within weeks—he would give three away during his lifetime—a lifetime that ended July 2020, He was 81.

    The movie ‘The Graduate’ was a sensation—the highest grossing film of 1967, with seven academy award nominations. It is fussed over to this day for capturing the “alienation of modern youth”—though they are not so modern anymore, have long since put their alienation behind them, and many have done quite well for themselves, thank you very much. Many ultimately chose the life of plastic that the Graduate protagonist rejected.

    But not author Charles Webb and his wife. Several times they came into money, and each time they would give it away. The Graduate movie is ranked the 17th greatest American film of all time by the American Film Institute; the “coming of age story is indeed one for the ages,” gushes Rotten Tomatoes. Webb didn’t make a dime off it and didn’t want to. He wouldn’t even do book signings—they were “a sin against decency.”

    What kind of a guy does this? Many times he received windfalls. Each time he gave it away. “Mercifully I wasn’t written into [the Graduate movie] deal,” he told the AP. “Nobody understands why I felt so relieved, but I count my longevity to not being swept into that. My wife and I have done a lot of things we wouldn’t have done if we were rich people. … I would have been counting my money instead of educating my children.”

    He’s not kidding about educating his children. He and his wife Fred—she took that name so as to identify with a group of men named Fred afflicted with low self-esteem (your guess is as good as mine)—pulled their two children from school. They homeschooled. This resonates with me because I did the same, only mine were not pulled out—they never saw the inside of a school other than an experimental 6th grade, after which both chose to homeschool again.

    Homeschooling wasn’t legal when Webbs did it. It was when we did, even if a little dicey—there were always unpredictable hoops to jump through. Once, the school district turned down my curriculum plan on the basis of, of all things, a weak music curriculum. The kids were enrolled in Suzuki violin, for crying out loud! I went to the library, copied and submitted some gobbledygook from a music textbook, and they were as happy as pigs in mud.

    A set of older friends in another jurisdiction were constantly harassed over their homeschooling—much more so than us. Yet my pal later reflected on his younger kids that were homeschooled vs his older ones that were not, and observed that the those of the first batch were far better at interacting with all factions of the community. Pretty much the same experience here—not that we had the contrast but we did have the experience of kids who readily mixed with all ages—whereas when I was in grade school, those kids in even one grade up might have been on another planet, to say nothing of adults. “I had no idea that there were so many stupid people,” said my son in complete innocence after he enrolled in the community college at age 16 and began his second experience in the classroom.

    The Webbs moved around a lot, sometimes camping, sometimes living out of a Volkswagen bus. Oldest son John called that part of his education “unschooling.” I know what unschooling is, too. We did it at times. It is simply a less rigid homeschooling, with more forbearance for letting youngsters pursue their own interests. I’d love to speak with these two kids—now adults. How did they turn out? “Not a lot of people picked up on it, but the title of ‘The Graduate’ was supposed to convey it was about education,” Webb told some reporter in 2006. He wasn’t keen on the mainstream model.

    Meanwhile, he and/or his artist wife did stints at KMart, picked fruit, cleaned houses. “When you run out of money, it’s a purifying experience,” he said. Besides the VW bus, they lived in motels, trailer parks, even a nudist colony—they managed that place during their tenure. They named their dog ‘Mrs. Robinson.’

    Now, these two were not Jehovah’s Witnesses. I don’t want to imply that they were. (Have JWs ever preached in a nudist colony?) Yet we have so many people who have renounced financial comfort so as to “have a greater share in the ministry” that when I see it elsewhere, it resonates no less than the homeschooling. I count as a friend today someone whose pursuit of a full-time ministry within Jehovah’s Witnesses triggered estrangement from his unbelieving oil baron family. “Look, Eric! Texas tea!” I call his attention to any gas station that we pass.

    The book that became the movie is not autobiographical. “I got interested in the wife of a good friend of my parents and … [realized] it might be better to write about it than to do it,” he told the online publication Thoughtcat in 2006. Yet much of it was his life—his remoteness from his wealthy connected parents, for example, along with their world that he found so superficial. His relationship with his heart specialist dad was “reasonably bad,” he said, and with his socialite mom, he “was always looking for crumbs of approval.” He had figured he might get a considerable number of those crumbs with the publication of his book, for she was an avid reader who might boast “My son is an author!” but he didn’t—probably the skewering of her lifestyle had something to do with it.

    Still, whether you give up every dime or not—you don’t have to do it just for the sake of doing it. The ministry of the apostle Paul caused him to know both “how to have an abundance and how to do without.” (Philippians 4:12) He knew and was comfortable in both places. This fellow was good at doing without, but he seems to have panicked at having an abundance. Sometimes you have to renounce your past. Sometimes in doing so, you swing too far the other way.

    Maybe it was a starving artist kind of thing. He even made a cliche over it: “The penniless author has always been the stereotype that works for me. . . . When in doubt, be down and out.” But not for any romantic reason—he pushed back at that notion. “We hope to make the point that the creative process is really a defense mechanism on the part of artists — that creativity is not a romantic notion.” It’s not like he would recommend it to others, or maybe even to himself. It is more like he felt driven to it, half against his will. I think of how so many comedians developed and honed their comedy as a means of defendIng themselves from school-age bullies. There is even a video that suggests that.

    A character from one of his other books—he wrote eight—an alcoholic painter, says: “What’s important for me is that I keep doing it, keep painting, and hold on to that feeling which goes along with putting the paint on the canvas,” he wrote. “It’s all I have and all I need.” This, too, resonates with me, a fellow who imagines himself a writer—and inherits the pluses along with the minuses.

    “Lots of people momentarily embrace the idea of leaving the rat race, like the characters in The Graduate,” said one obit writer. “Mr. Webb [and his wife] did it, with all the consequences it entailed. If they regretted the choice, they did not say so.” And, “Webb has such an easygoing charm about him, such a friendly and sincere presence,” another wrote years prior. This also resonates with me, who is just as pleasant as—no, that is going too far. In the dog park I constantly have to apologize for my dog, who has become grouchy in his old age toward other dogs, “just like me,” I say.

    As though to get in the final word, the condensed obituary in TheWeek Magazine read: “The Graduate author who ran from success” Did he? Or is it that they can only imagine their own definition of success there at TheWeek?

  • ‘Born Into the Faith’

    The one area where detractors have some validity is in saying that the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses did not make the same choice as did their parents. The parents searched, sometimes for decades. They weighed both paths carefully before choosing the pathway of serving God over the pathway of pursuing the common goals of the world. Their children have never made this search—they were ‘born into the truth’—something we portray as a great asset, and yet something that contains the same drawbacks as being born into wealth. We probably are naive to think that ‘born into the truth’ does not make one vulnerable in some respects. 

    The first generation makes the wealth and is thereafter grounded in life. The second generation inherits it, and deprived of that values-forming experience, becomes insufferable, unappreciative, profligate, isolated from the common people—some combination of the foregoing. It doesn’t have to work that way, but it does often enough for the pattern to become a stereotype. 

    What’s a wealthy person to do? Cast his son out to live in the refrigerator box until he earns his own wealth? Obviously not. Better to be born into wealth than into poverty. Better to be born into a spiritual paradise than into a spiritual dessert. But the wealthy parent that has any sense makes his son experience what he did himself to the degree possible—makes the kid start on the factory floor as a regular worker, for example—makes the kid earn privileges, doesn’t just hand him things—makes him work his way into his inheritance. 

    The Witness parent who simply expects the offspring to ‘make the truth your own’ without allowing him a glimpse into the other side—well, couldn’t that be likened to the wealthy parent who expects his offspring to ‘make the family wealth your own’ without allowing the character-building and adversity-overcoming experiences that were instrumental in his own formation?

    It is a matter of degree as to how that is done—I would not suggest that nobody is doing it—and each family must find its own way. Since the beginning of time, parents have endeavored to bring their children up in principles they have convinced themselves are true. Since the Industrial Age at least, general society has tried to pull those children away into its own chosen paths. There certainly is no educational reason that children should be schooled away from their parents at ages as young as 4. It is for societal reasons that compulsory public schooling began. Children ought be separated from the pernicious influence and prejudices of their parents, the thinking went, to make them more compliant to the greater aims of the greater world.

    So Witnesses are going to train their children in godly principles—that is only to be expected. It is not the case that if you leave children untrained, they will grow up free, unencumbered, and when of age, with choose their own values from the rich cornucopia of life’s offerings. No. All it means is that someone else will train them. The anti-JW activists are only bellyaching because they want to themselves be those trainers—they do not raise the same protest with regard to the children of anyone else.

     

  • Is it Climate Change or a Massive Scam? Either Way, it Suggests a Presentation.

    “Hundreds of thousands of kids marching the streets. Terrorized due to climate change OR terrorized at a massive scam. It is nuts either way. It is child abuse from the older generation either way.”

    It is a presentation that I have been playing around with lately. Make the observation, and the scripture you offer to read is Revelation 11:18:

    “But the nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time came for the dead to be judged and to reward your slaves the prophets and the holy ones and those fearing your name, the small and the great, and to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”

    It is a tricky verse to read. All you are really looking at is the phrase at the end, that God will “bring to ruin those ruining the earth.” Just paraphrase the lead-in: “It’s of future times. It’s what God plans to do. Some of it takes a bit of explaining, but not that last phrase.

    The beauty of the presentation is that you do not have to take a stand on whether is there is global warming or not. People will argue to the end of time about which truth is really truth. That is what people are good at—arguing. You don’t have to go there.

    Anytime I read a verse, I explain afterwards in a sentence or two why I read it. It’s rather easy to point to the householders fine home (assuming that it is) and say: “What would you do if you had tenants ruining it? Would you bulldoze the home? Or would you toss the people?”

    Ex-Witnesses who really really oppose the preaching work will—I’ve never heard anyone else take this position—assert that what Jehovah’s Witnesses should do is stop just quoting Revelation 11:18 and roll up their sleeves so as to do something now to fix things. Don’t let them get away with it. What are they smoking? Do they think that JWs would weigh in as a united block, tipping the balance in their favor? They would fracture into the two opposing poles, the same as everyone else—climate change advocates versus scam perpetrators—and they would just cancel each other out. Tell the grumbler that since he thinks he is so smart and his ex-brothers are so stupid, that they would probably weigh in mostly on the side opposite his and he would just be shooting himself in the foot. He doesn’t want them to fix anything. He just wants them shedding their unity, joining the fray, and forgetting the ministry.

    The climate-change fight illustrates one of the reasons that most who become Witnesses do so in the first place. This world faces any number of paralyzing concerns, and in the face of them it is just that—paralyzed. It is the inevitable upshot of humans trying to rule themselves. Each one has a different idea. No one will yield to another. The children pay the heaviest price of man’s inability to govern. Witnesses have little trouble buying into the premise that God alone, earth and humankind’s Creator, has the wisdom to know just how things ought to be governed.

    Someone likened reading the Drudge Report to reading the Book of Revelation. Every new outrageous thing is an endorsement of Ecclesiastes 8:9–“man has dominated man to his injury.” Every new outrageous thing is an endorsement of Jeremiah 10:23–“To earthling man his way does not belong; it doesn’t not belong to man who is walking even to direct his own step). Every new outrageous thing rings out as though a prophesy. Each item is an indictment of what unchecked human wisdom produces.

    Will the voice of the children be the ones to decide the future? Or do they simply become the pawns of cynical adults pursuing their own causes? What truly would be the “power of the children” would be if they boycotted school and did not return until there was a resolution—either that climate change was real, necessitating such-an-such policies, or that it was a scam with the goal of promoting political policies, necessitating discarding those policies. Otherwise, it is just a day off school, which many kids will choose for exactly that reason.

    A boycott of school would have had even more relevance after the Florida high school shootings in which 17 died and another 17 were injured. There were students saying at the time that they would boycott school. That course does not seem unreasonable to me if adults cannot take action to guarantee that school will not become a shooting gallery with themselves as targets. Instead, “responsible” adults funneled their outrage, fear, and energy into some silly one-day gathering in Washington that provided headlines but was otherwise forgotten the next day.

    What if they had boycotted school and not come back until their safety could be assured—is it too much to ask that children should feel safe in school? Two possible courses of action presented themselves at the time. Eliminate guns, at least the rapid fire ones, or arm teachers and/or sentries—there are veterans who would count it a privilege to guard the next generation. That kind of boycott might solve the problem.

    Except we all know that it wouldn’t. Even in the most life or death scenario, even in the scenario where backs are to the wall, it will make no difference. Opposing factions will not agree. They never do. Again, it is a large part of why people become Jehovah’s Witnesses in the first place: humans don’t have the wisdom to govern themselves. God does. He created us and the planet. How could he not?

    Having razor sharp minds trained at the university or anywhere else is only part of the equation, and it is not the most significant part. If agreement cannot be reached, the razor-sharpness goes to naught. It even becomes a liability, since, in frustration at not being able to persuade the other side, its proponents resort to extreme tactics. Education that does not include the ability to agree is ineffectual education that barely merits the term. It is rather like a team with a formidable offense but absolutely no defense—what good is it? It is another reason that people become Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their formal education may not be as high, but as they take their cue from godly thinking and not that of humans, they can run circles around their “smarter” counterparts because they are able to agree. They are able to cooperate, they know how to yield, and they can coordinate action.

     

  • Skirmish #50017: “I see that you not supporting this [dumbing down] trend in Organization, but that is how it is

    Srecko: “Simplified editions of text in WTJWORG publications is normal result and normal need, not just for poorly educated secular people, but because  WTJWORG advises only few years of standard, basic education for JW members as something that is ALL they need in this World without Future…I see that you not supporting this trend in Organization, but that is how it is”

     

    And it is how it always has been. And it is how it must be.

    The “uneducated and ordinary” governing men of Acts 4:13 always remained uneducated and ordinary. The “For you see his calling of you, brothers, that there are not many wise in a fleshly way” of 1 Corinthians 1:26 always remained the case. The “wise and intellectual ones” that do not think Jesus’ teaching worth their time never reconsider their view.

    Those identifying themselves as Christian are often embarrassed over this, and seek to present it as a distressing circumstance that they grew out of—“Yes, we may have started out lowly, but look at how we have pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps!” they say. They should not reason this way.

    If the education of this world was worth the paper it was printed on, it would have been reflected in better conditions today. Surely today’s education model must take responsibility for the world is has collectively created. Very seldom are national leaders poorly educated. Typically they have gone to the finest universities.

    Usually when something doesn’t work, it is discarded. In the case of “education,” however, the assumption is that more of it is needed—education is the way out, its advocates say. 

    Generally speaking, those of the greater world are smarter than us. However, most of their schemes will come to nothing because they do not know how to get along; they do not know how to overcome greed; they do not know how to overcome class division or racial division. They sell what knowledge that they do have—you’d better have substantial funds on hand, or plan on going into deep debt—to benefit from their knowledge. One “educated” person in the Witness organization is worth 50 in the overall world because there are neither pay walls nor turf wars where they have come to call home. They discard the baggage of education that so plainly has not worked and cherry-pick the parts—subjects of pure practicality and applied science—that do work.

    A main subtheme that lies just below the surface of those who look down upon Witnesses is the latter’s sense of superiority due to having “higher” education—elitism is as strong as any force, and as misplaced, as any of the other ones that divide people and keep them from reaching but a fraction of their potential.

    ***

    “Now when they saw the outspokenness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were astonished. And they began to realize that they had been with Jesus.” Acts 4:13

    For you see his calling of you, brothers, that there are not many wise in a fleshly way, not many powerful, not many of noble birth,  but God chose the foolish things of the world to put the wise men to shame; and God chose the weak things of the world to put the strong things to shame;”

    “At that time Jesus said in response: “I publicly praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intellectual ones and have revealed them to young children.” Matthew 11:25

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    photo:my desk to back right, by NJ tech teacher