Those who are bringing back classical education as an alternative to the deadends evident in John Dewey’s progressive education are familiar with the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric, the three liberal arts that lead to a mastery of language. The other four liberal arts, the quadrivium, though, gets short shrift: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

Many people think that the liberal arts is just another word for the humanities, forgetting the quadrivium completely. Dorothy L. Sayers, whose essay “On the Lost Tools of Learning” was a major catalyst for the revival of classical education, thought that the quadrivium represented “subjects” that would be learned after the trivium provided the tools for doing so. In this she was just wrong. The quadrivium are “arts”; that is, powers of the human mind. They are essentially mathematical, even in the way music was approached. Thus, classical education embraces the two spheres that educators recognize are necessary for education: language and mathematics.

Anyway, my daughter, who has been studying Boethius, the great systematizer of the quadrivium, explained to me the connections between the arts of the quadrivium, in a way that also helped me see the way mathematics really does provide a unifying model for the order and design that underlies all existence.

arithmetic = numbers
geometry = numbers in space
music = numbers in time
astronomy = numbers in space and time

Do you see why music is numbers in time? And why astronomy is numbers in space and time?

Now what we need is to bring mathematical education back from the dead–it’s telling that progressive education, for all its claim of being scientific and all, is failing most dramatically precisely in teaching science and mathematics–by coming up with a classical way of teaching it. Does anyone have any ideas? (And by this I don’t mean just teaching it more effectively or traditionally, such as Saxon Math. That and similar methods still lift numbers out of any context, which is not the classical way.)

HT: Joanna

Colleen LaRose is a white, middle-class suburbanite from Pennsylvania.  She became a terrorist recruiter known on the Internet as Jihad Jane.  She was arrested for her involvement in a plot to kill the Swedish cartoonist whose caricature of Mohammed inflamed the Islamic world.

from  BBC News – Profile: ‘Jihad Jane’ from Main Street:

The blonde middle-aged woman apparently raised no concerns with her boyfriend or her neighbours on Main Street, Pennsburg, near Philadelphia.

But online she had allegedly agreed to kill in the name of holy war, believing her European looks would allow her to blend in among Swedes as she homed in on her target.

Colleen LaRose, according to a US court indictment, posted messages online under the name Jihad Jane, expressing her desire to participate in jihad, or holy war.

Arrested in October 2009, Ms LaRose had exchanged emails over 15 months to recruit fighters for “violent jihad”.

Her activities apparently came as a surprise to her boyfriend Kurt Gorman, whom she met in 2005.

Mr Gorman told Associated Press: “She was a good-hearted person. She pretty much stayed around the house.” . . .

“Only death will stop me here that I am so close to the target!” she is accused of writing.

A Department of Justice statement said Ms LaRose and five others “recruited men on the internet to wage violent jihad in South Asia and Europe, and recruited women on the internet who had passports and the ability to travel to and around Europe in support of violent jihad”.

Ms LaRose, a US citizen born in 1963, is charged with “conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, making false statements to a government official and attempted identity theft.”

She was apparently approached by others after she posted a video on YouTube in June 2008, saying she was “desperate to do something somehow to help” ease the suffering of Muslims, the indictment said.

Web images show her wearing a Muslim headscarf, but Mr Gorman said he never saw anything like that at their home, nor did she attend any religious services.

Unknown to him, she had allegedly agreed to travel to Sweden and kill Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who had angered Muslims by drawing the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog.

As the folks at Get Religion complain, the media has done hardly any reporting on the religious angle, which is surely the biggest question of this story: How and why did Colleen LaRose become a radical Muslim? What is the attraction of a religion like that, especially to someone of Ms. LaRose’s demographic? Any ideas?

Mollie Hemingway writes about media coverage of sex-selective abortion, particularly in China and India where families want sons and so get an abortion if their in utero baby is a girl.  This even has acquired a name, something to add to our vocabulary:  gendercide.

Mollie (I can call her that because I know her) cites a story in The Christian Science Monitor about the consequences of wiping out so many females in the population.  It features a farmer in India lamenting that he can’t find a wife to marry.  Mollie tells about how he is “lamenting that he no longer cares about caste, religion or looks — he just wants a wife to give him a son. Funny, isn’t it. It’s hard to find a wife to give you a son when the people of your country are killing so many of the unborn female children because they’re not sons.”

via The war on girls » GetReligion.

A New York lawmaker has introduced a bill that would ban restaurants from cooking with salt.

Some New York City chefs and restaurant owners are taking aim at a bill introduced in the New York Legislature that, if passed, would ban the use of salt in restaurant cooking.

“No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption by customers of such restaurant, including food prepared to be consumed on the premises of such restaurant or off of such premises,” the bill, A. 10129 , states in part.

The legislation, which Assemblyman Felix Ortiz , D-Brooklyn, introduced on March 5, would fine restaurants $1,000 for each violation.

via Chefs Call Proposed New York Salt Ban ‘Absurd’.

Think of all the great chefs in New York City who would be forced, by law, to turn out bland food! We have gone from the prohibition of alcohol–which was wrong-headed and didn’t work–to a mindset that wants the prohibition of table salt! A substance, I might add, that is necessary for life.

Christopher Hitchens is currently one of the major evangelists (if one can use that word) for atheism.  His brother Peter, though, another British journalist, is a Christian.  You have got to read Peter’s account of how he changed from atheism to Christianity and how he now gets along with his brother:

How I found God and peace with my atheist brother: PETER HITCHENS traces his journey back to Christianity | Mail Online.

Germany has played nice since the end of World War II, trying to expiate its guilt by pushing for the European Union, sacrificing the solid Deutschmark for the ups and downs of the Euro, and using its strong economy to bail out other European countries.  But what is happening in Greece is causing Germans to say, “enough.”  So reports Anne Applebaum:

“Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks — and the Acropolis too!”

– headline, Bild newspaper, March 4

Sometimes they cut to the essence of the story, those tabloid-headline writers, even when they haven’t got the quotation exactly right. What the German politician quoted in the Bild article cited above actually said was: “A bankrupt party must use everything he has to make money and serve his creditors. . . . Greece owns buildings, companies and several uninhabited islands, which can now be used to repay debt.”

What the politician meant, though, was more accurately reflected in that Bild headline: The Germans are fed up with paying the bills of everybody in Europe, they don’t want to bail out the feckless Greeks with their flagrantly inaccurate official statistics, they resent being Europe’s banker of last resort, they object to the universal demand that they plug the vast holes in the Greek deficit in the name of “European unity” — and for the first time in a long time they are saying this out loud. Not only are tabloids demanding the sale of the Acropolis; Germany’s deeply serious paper of record, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has pointed out that while the Greeks are out protesting having to raise their pension eligibility age from 61 to 63, Germany recently raised its pension age from 65 to 67: “Does that mean that the Germans should in future extend the working age from 67 to 69, so that Greeks can enjoy their retirement?”

With an unerringly poor sense of timing, the Greeks have, in response, chosen this moment to flaunt their own resentments. One Greek minister complained to the BBC that the Nazis “took away the Greek gold that was in the Bank of Greece, they took away the Greek money and they never gave it back.” The mayor of Athens has demanded 70 billion euros (about $95 billion) for the damage the Nazis left behind after the war. The Greek consumer organization, not exactly thankful for the German bailout or Europe’s demands for Greek budget cuts, has called for a boycott of German products. Officially, the Germans have described these comments as “not helpful.” Unofficially, the German press is foaming at the mouth (see above), for once accurately reflecting the views of German politicians and German voters.

via Anne Applebaum – Germany’s tug-of-war with Greece – washingtonpost.com.

A baby woolly mammoth has been discovered in Russia’s frozen tundra.  Not a fossil, not bones, but an intact woolly mammoth!  It will be displayed in Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.

Wooly mammoth carcass from Siberia reveals information about ice-age creatures – washingtonpost.com.

You have got to read the story of Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of the founder of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, who became an Israeli spy and then a convert to Christianity.  How did that latter part happen?  It was very simple:

During those quiet years he met a British cabbie in Jerusalem who gave him an English-Arabic copy of the New Testament and invited him to attend a bible study session at their hotel. “I found that I was really drawn to the grace, love and humility that Jesus talked about,” he says in “Son of Hamas.” . . .

“I converted to Christianity because I was convinced by Jesus Christ as a character, as a personality. I loved him, his wisdom, his love, his unconditional love. I didn’t leave [the Islamic] religion to put myself in another box of religion. At the same time it’s a beautiful thing to see my God exist in my life and see the change in my life. I see that when he does exist in other Middle Easterners there will be a change.

“I’m not trying to convert the entire nation of Israel and the entire nation of Palestine to Christianity. But at least if you can educate them about the ideology of love, the ideology of forgiveness, the ideology of grace. Those principles are great regardless, but we can’t deny they came from Christianity as well.”

Mr. Yousef says he felt burned out and decided to stop working for the Shin Bet in 2006, against their wishes. He made his way to friends in southern California whom he’d met through bible study.

As the son of a Muslim cleric, he says he had reached the conclusion that terrorism can’t be defeated without a new understanding of Islam. Here he echoes other defectors from Islam such as the former Dutch parliamentarian and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Do you consider your father a fanatic? “He’s not a fanatic,” says Mr. Yousef. “He’s a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he’s doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn’t matter if he’s a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don’t want to admit this is an ideological war.

“The problem is not in Muslims,” he continues. “The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to.”

via Weekend Interview with Mosab Hassan Yousef: ‘They Need to Be Liberated From Their God’ – WSJ.com.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank is no conservative, but he is worried, very worried about the deficit.  He sees what is happening in Greece as our future:

Look into the face of George Papandreou, America, and see your future.

The Greek prime minister is in town this week as part of a world tour seeking help for his beleaguered homeland. Greece is broke, its government on the verge of default. As Papandreou landed in Washington, there were strikes in the streets of Athens over his tax increases, his wage cuts for government workers and his scaling back of retirement benefits.

As he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton faced the cameras Monday, she spoke of the weekend’s election in Iraq. “Greece is the birthplace of democracy, so anytime there's a democratic election anywhere in the world, Greece should get a royalty, Prime Minister,” Clinton said.

“Would help our deficit, too,” Papandreou joked.

“Yeah,” Clinton agreed. “It’s a new way of plugging the hole.”

Remember that scene. If current trends persist, an American president will be doing the same thing in about 10 years. He or she will probably be in Beijing, asking for more favorable interest rates or pleading with the Chinese government to keep speculators from betting on an American default.

Greece’s national debt last year reached 113 percent of gross domestic product. The United States will hit that in about 2020, according to the Government Accountability Office, assuming policy continues as it has. And last year’s U.S. budget deficit amounted to 9.9 percent of GDP, nearly rivaling Greece’s 12.7 percent.

To pull Greece back from the edge, Papandreou has promised to cut the deficit to 3 percent of GDP by 2012. For the U.S. government to make an equivalent cut, it would have to shut down the Pentagon and a few other agencies: the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Health and Human Services, Energy, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, the Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, plus the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA — and even then we'd come up a few dollars short.

via Dana Milbank – From Greece, an economic cautionary tale for the U.S. – washingtonpost.com.

Maybe not exactly, but the Academy Awards give Roger Simon reason to think that the ideological spectrum in Hollywood may be widening:

The 2010 Academy Awards may not have marked the end of “liberal Hollywood” as we know it, but they certainly put a solid dent in it. With the pro-military “The Hurt Locker” winning over the enviro-pabulum of “Avatar” and Sandra Bullock garnering the Best Actress Oscar for a Christian movie, the times are a-changin’ at least somewhat, maybe even a lot.

But one thing is now certain. It is time for conservative, center-right and libertarian filmmakers to stop feeling sorry for themselves and go out and just do it. Their “victocrat” days are over. No more excuses. “The Hurt Locker” and “The Blind Side” have proven that it can be done. Get out of the closet, guys and gals. If you want to make a film with themes you believe in, quit whining about Industry prejudice and start writing that script and trying to get it made. That’s not an easy thing, no matter what your politics.

Right siders can take inspiration too from Sunday’s Oscar ceremonies themselves. They weren’t defamed for a moment. Missing in action was the usual libo-babble, no extended hymns to the cause du jour or ritual Bush-bashing. And Barack Obama wasn’t even mentioned. Not once. But the troops were – several times by Kathryn Bigelow.

via Roger L. Simon » Did the 2010 Academy Awards Mark the End of “Liberal Hollywood”?.