“Superficial reading nearly always leads to superficial thinking. And we have increasingly become a society that does not read so much as browse. Though the Internet moves vast amounts of facts to our fingertips, it doesn’t teach us to analyze them and create a comprehensive thought—so we often confuse facts with wisdom and understanding.” (Hat tip: Lars)

Patrick Kurp talks about our culture a bit and students and teachers who hate the cultural atmosphere they breathe.

When Bill writes “the Western cultural heritage that we can’t throw away fast enough,” I confess I thought first of the high-school students I worked with on Monday (rather than their intellectual enablers). Their ignorance of our inheritance is exceeded only by their eagerness to avoid it. I eavesdropped on a conversation between a soon-to-graduate senior and a staff member. The girl had spent much of the day making a collage of images of under-dressed females clipped from women’s magazines (image a boy working on the same project). With a straight face she described herself as “a conceptual artist,” and told the teacher she might enroll at a nearby community college but was reluctant because she might have to read The Great Gatsby. “I hear ya,” the teacher said.

I don’t, the blogger opined. I cannot relate.

Do students read Francis Bacon anymore? Here’s a short essay that contains popular quotations from Bacon’s “Essays, Civil and Moral,” posted here for readers of the future.

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment, and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best, from those that are learned.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning [i.e. pruning], by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation. Continue reading Read to weigh and consider →

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library sends one book a month to kids under 5 years old. When I first heard of the program, I said I didn’t want taxpayers to spend money sending my kids books they don’t need. We’re a literate family. We have piles of books. But the woman at the promotional booth told me the program is privately funded, and getting books in the mail is tons of fun. So I signed up my one-year-old, and it’s been a good experience for all of us.

Now, the Imagination Library is going to work with United Way of America to expand their program nationwide.

Books what changed my life: The Literary Saloon notes Rowan Williams’ selection for life-changing books. Williams is the Archbishop of Canterbury who has overseen the dismantling of the Anglican Church over the past few years.

Hitler had thousands of books in his library. What do you think he had in them? Military history, of course. Books on horse-breeding with red marks slashed through the pictures of mares. Pornography. “German cowboy-and-Indian tales of Karl May,” “British thriller-writer Edgar Wallace,” and romances by Hedwig Courts-Mahler, “kept in plain covers so as not to reveal their titles.”



The Library of Congress has 1,200 volumes from his library, ones that were kept in a mine for safety.