education

This is a preview version of www.capetowndeclaration.org. The site launches mid-January 2008. Send feedback here.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration arises from a small but lively meeting convened in Cape Town on 14-15 September 2007. The purpose of the meeting was to accelerate the international effort to promote open resources, technology and teaching practices in education. The participants represented many points of view, many disciplines and many nations. All are involved in ongoing open education initiatives.

continue reading "The Cape Town Open Education Declaration"

The really good things in life—happiness, love, joy—are not facts but truths. They cannot be learned as doctrine because they do not exist in doctrine. They have always been, but they only become under the right circumstances.

continue reading "Faith, Myth and the Truth Becoming"

I left the rant below in the long and sometimes long winded list of comments (mine was number 102) to a post by Keith DeRose titled Characterizing a Fogbank: What Is Postmodernism, and Why Do I Take Such a Dim View of it?. The blog is sponsored by the University of Missouri department of philosopsy and called Certain Doubts.

continue reading "A Rant Against a Rant Against Postmodernism"

This year is our second for homeschooling our two children. And this year we decided to use a packaged curriculum. So today we are poring over 4 boxes, containing $800 worth of textbooks, workbooks and teacher's guides from a Christian homeschool curriculum.

I must add here that our reason for homeschooling is not a distrust or even a dislike of our local schools. In our six years experience with them, we found that fully half of the teachers were above average and only half were below. Just as we would expect of any profession. Neither do we hope to shelter our kids from humanism. They could get plenty of that with institutional Christianity—as we shall see. The reason has to do with one of them getting caught in one of the black holes of the over-politicized, over-analyzed, over-standardized system. Having worked as a manufacturing engineer, I know a factory when I see it. And factories merely scrap raw material that doesn't fit specifications—while utterly clueless why the engineer set the specs in the first place. The only way to break free was to do the job ourselves. And here we are, one year later, having caught up with two years of reading and math and having replaced a one minute attention span with one an hour and half long. And we are so glad that we were right. It really looked otherwise in the beginning. Sometimes you just have to chuck the standard and do what you know is correct.

continue reading "Does Traditional Arithmetic Give Glory to God?"