Category: Education: Life-long

The Harvard Classics

Let’s face it. What is taught in schools — K-12 through college — is not education. It’s job training. And not very good job training at that!

Do it yourself:

The Harvard Classics is a 51-volume Great Books list, compiled and edited by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot in 1909. All volumes are now in the public domain. Free pdf versions (and other formats) are available at archive.org. A complete list of volumes and links is supplied below.

Of interest is Dr. Eliot’s suggestion that a superior education can be gained by reading from this list for only 15 minutes a day.

Source: The Harvard Classics

Freeing the Humanities from Academia

The greatest assault on Western Civilization came from the inside, and what was once the deepest reposit of that knowledge: Academia. This is nowhere seem more deeply than in the purging of the humanities of millennia of learned knowledge and the wisdom of generations to make room for its antithesis.…

Hence, we must all take it upon ourselves to learn, cherish, and teach the great humanities of Western Civilization so that some piece of us lives on rather than be relegated tot he ash heap of history.

So say we all. Amen.

A quick followup: since I posted this I discovered a website called Erenow, “one of the largest collections of online free books on history.”

Did I mention free?

Source: Freeing the Humanities from Academia

Essential Knowledge: Part VI | The Z Blog

The fall of the Western Roman Empire used to be thought of as a collapse of civilization, leaving a great void into which swarmed barbarians. Out of the rubble, the people of Europe slowly rebuilt civilization into what we think of as the Middle Ages. The reality is the fall of Rome was a process. Roman rule was replaced by something else, something local and indigenous.

Zman’s ‘Essential Knowledge’ posts are full of links to good books for your continuing education.

Source: Essential Knowledge: Part VI | The Z Blog