Dr. Benjamin Carson Shames Obama

And he did it in such a way that prevents smart people from claiming he shouldn’t be saying what he does in the speech.

Yesterday on The Five, dumbo Beckel tried to get his “one more thing.” It was going to be a jab at Dr. Carson over Carson’s statements about tax codes and the class warfare and tithing. He started by pretending to be so Christian and referring to the Apostle Paul’s teaching about paying the government. And then he tried to go into a diatribe about how wrong it was to try to embarrass THE ONE on that stage. The other’s quickly shut him down.
I wish there had been time and that someone had enough knowledge of Biblical interpretation to have countered what he thought was the lesson in the Bible that he was referring to. It would have been a perfect chance to show the stupidity of the left in this regard.
Most people don’t realize that at the time Christ made the “render unto Caesar” statement, the Jews were not only paying extremely high taxes to the ROMANS (and thus connecting it to Carson’s implications about the fall of Rome) and then having to tithe for their religious leaders (many of whom were at the time very corrupt). These people were being taxed to death. Christ was trying to get them to see that the revolution should come in the manner of their attitudes and in their faith.
What does history teach us but that Christianity often grew and took over not through rebellion so much as through the truths it teaches?
A history lesson for Mr. Beckel through non-politically-correct speech might go a long way.
It’s sad for me that television itself with all the interruptions for ads and with the time constraints for each show doesn’t allow for good clear lessons.
I am sad that Dr. Carson’s speech couldn’t have been much longer.

HELENK2,

I hope I am not being too pedantic here. So my response to your excellent link will be a long illustrative response.

I agree completely with Davis Hanson about the time period for when our educational system went down the tubes, I was teaching during that time. I began teaching when some of Jackie Kennedy’s (and many others’) opinions about the importance of a good classical style of education to a free society–art, literature, philosophy, etc.–were considered the cornerstones.

Teaching English was exciting as we were teaching the building blocks to great literature–how to analyze plot, character, theme, setting, point of view, etc.–of a piece of literature. Our text books (as they still do) contained only time-tested great literature.

Nowadays, most young teachers hardly use the texts and instead pick current facile, superficial, simplistic books that are, in their minds, relevant. Most of the plots, dialogue, themes, are also facile simplistic and supeficial and will not be remembered two years later. But they get great class discussions that have nothing to do with literature and what a great piece of literature will give them in terms of insight to the ways to lead lives.

I remember being waylaid by some young teachers in the teachers’ lounge about Romeo and Juliet, since we were all teaching that to ninth graders. They were so proud of themselves for the great “creative” responses they got from their students from an assignment that asked the students to choose what they thought was the turning point of the play and defend their decision.

I dismissed them and said that their job had been to show them the turning point and to explain why it was the turning point because that is the reason this play is always included in the ninth grade texts.

First, Shakespeare always notoriously took the stories for his plays from popular poems and stories at the time. The most current popular poem of his time as he was writing that play had a clear moral–the dangers of the irrational actions of youth, of not listening the wisdom of the past. It was a poem meant to teach young people to listen more to their elders. It was not, as we like to think, only a story of young beautiful love.

Second, Shakespear had read Aristotle’s Poetics and his theories about tragedy and the “tragic flaw” of the tragic hero. That meant that Shakepeare always followed the idea of symmetry in his plays, meaning they would be five acts with the turning point in the middle third act. (Shakespeare could not always follow all of Aristotle’s rules, but tried to follow what he could). That left an equal rising action and falling action.

From that it was easy to see that Romeo’s flaw, his youthful emotional rashness had to be at the root of the turning point. It came after he turned away from Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, who challenged him to a fight. He said he had more reason to love Tybalt then than to hate him because of family feuds. Romeo’s best friend Mercutio (the Prince’s cousin) then thinks Romeo is being a coward and so fights Tybalt and is killed. Then Romeo abandons his first mature answer and irrationally and emotionally fights and kills Tybalt and brings down the banishment of the Prince. From there it’s all down hill.

I then took apart all the illogic of some of the beliefs their students had posited, blaming it on the nurse or on Friar Laurence, etc.

I remember the silence as I left the teachers’ lounge. Maybe teaching English was about more than eliciting creative responses, though illogical ones. Maybe it is about more than discussing current teenage feelings.
These young teachers are learning only stupid critical theories, as Hanson said–gender studies, post-modernism, deconstructionism, marxist critical theory, etc. None of them know about the classic building blocks of great literature.
But that period of time when I first taught didn’t last long for me. Funding for arts and humanities was dropped for funding for mathematics and science (all good because they of course also teach logic) because of the arms race. The importance of the arts and humanities for keeping a culture unified, however, was dropped, and in its place those fields of study became nothing but the teaching of pablum.
Who killed Homer, indeed! And who killed Virgil? Who killed the long ago author of Beowulf? Who killed so many writers that no one reads any more? I always feel like a throwback to another time, though in my mind a better time.

I remember that at the start of the drive for voucher programs and charter schools, an inner city Black Woman was in the news because she began on her own taking in children to school. And her major reading requirements were from Shakespeare. Her point was that the reading could be handled by these students whom everyone had already marked as impossible to educate and that they deserved a real education instead of the things they were getting in schools.

I’ve often thought of that woman and wish I could remember her name. It was during the first part of my turning away from the Democratic Party platform. I had a young son who was also suffering from the junk being provided him and the emotional scarring of being in a small town school. I wished at the time that I could have stopped earning a salary and established my own home school.