7 Takes: Questions about Higher Education – From a College Student

My awesome niece & goddaughter just started college, and the other day she phoned me. “Do you have an hour or two? I need to get your opinions on higher education for this paper I’m writing.”

I’m pleased to tell you I kept my comments to 59 minutes, a record for me. She e-mailed me some follow-up and some get-the-quote-right questions, and that’s on my to-do list for today.

If you’d like to answer some or all of them at your place, I know she’d be interested in your answers. Leave the link in my combox and I’ll direct her to take a look. Or just answer in the combox here, if you aren’t a blogger yourself.

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1. What is your opinion of the value of college in today’s society?

2. Do you believe in the theory that everyone should have a college education?

3. According to Louis Menand, author of “Live and Learn”, there are three theories of why people attend college. The first theory is that college is an intelligent test meaning people go to college to prove they are smart. The second theory people go to college is for the social benefits since college should theoretically be getting people ready to enter society. The third theory is that college is job training. How does this align with you own theory of the purpose of college? Do you believe in these some values?

4. Growing up was your value of a college education influenced in any way? If so was it family? Teachers? Or some other form?

5. In recent years the availability of a college education has changed and become more accessible to more people. For example there are online Universities, certain states offer scholarships to many high school graduates, and there is government funding to minorities. Do you agree or disagree with this?

6. What will you teach your own kids about the value of a college education? What influences this?

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Since she had 6 questions and our theme is 7 takes, how about you add a 7th: What else would you like to say? FYI for those who haven’t heard, Erin at Bearing Blog has a whole series on this topic.

Thanks to our hostess, the always-inquisitive Jen Fulwiler. Pray for Allie Hathaway, then visit Jen’s site, ~~Scorpions Are Us~~ ConversionDiary.com to see more quick takes.

Book Giveaway – Catholic Mother’s Companion to Pregnancy

Look what just came in the mail for me:

Two copies. Free from Ave Maria, as a tie-in to Sarah’s virtual book tour, which will be stopping at this blog on Monday October 8th. So how do you win a free copy?

Well, it doesn’t involve me mailing you things, that’s for sure. I got a call last week from the Office of Family Life at the Diocese of Charleston, saying, “Would you please help serve cookies after the Mass for Expectant Parents on October 14th in Columbia, SC?”

And I said, “Yes, I’ll be happy to do that, but only if you agree to give these books away, because it is much easier for me to turn up for mass someplace than for me to go to the post office.”

We think there might be pregnant people coming to that mass. Because the bishop will be giving the exceedingly cool Blessing for the Child in the Womb. But you can come put your name in the hat for the drawing, even if your plan is to win it for some other person who is pregnant, or who hopes to be, or who just likes to read fantabulous devotionals for Catholic pregnant ladies.

Also there’ll be an NFP table. And cookies. Did I mention cookies?

3.5 Time Outs: New Things

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who’s also doing a time-travel edition today.

3.5 Time Outs Tuesday — Click and be amazed.

Blogging Popes. That’s my topic for today. Not the kind you’re thinking of, though.

See, here’s what happened: Saturday night I was bored, tired, and itching for something to read. Something fun and relaxing and novel. Meaning, new-to-me. I usually grab one of my daughter’s library books for this purpose — just enough entertainment to get me through a non-digital Sunday, but not so much that I’ll be out of service, glued to a book, for 10,000 hours waiting for Br. Cadfael to tell me who did it. But I needed novelty.

So I went to Papal Encyclicals Online. I’m sure that’s what you do, too. But before you get too impressed, keep in mind that the three reasons this was a possible source of reading material were:

I’d never read most of them before. Strike one against my Catholic-nerd credentials.
They’re usually very short. This is why I’ve read the minor prophets, but *still* never gotten through all of Isaiah.
There was no chance I’d let the cat starve, or grouse at my children for interrupting me during an especially gripping scene.

And the thing is, they tend to cover that same juicy ground as your average Catholic blogger, only you get bonus credit for not being stuck to the computer all day while you work up your angry frenzy at the injustice in the world. Of course, no Star Trek screen shots for illustrations, but look, I was desperate for entertainment.

And the one I picked was Rerum Novarum. Which is basically a series of blog posts on economics. Perfect.

(Let me just say right now, JPII’s follow-up work is not blog-genre. Waaay more wordy. Waaay more. I haven’t finished it yet. But I’m half thinking, “What more is there to say? Leo.Encyclicalpress.com already covered the whole territory. But you know how it is, people need to explain the obvious. Or maybe people needed the obvious re-explained.)

Here’s a sample snippet of the Leonine goodness:

Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.

And this:

The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men.

Followed by this:

To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.

See? I spent my weekend reading 64 Cath-Econ-blog posts, 19th century edition.

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And although I could pretty much shut my eyes and point my finger anywhere in the document to find a good quotable quote, one of my underlined favorites is

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Well that’s all for today. Still accepting suggestions for additions to the sidebar, so tell me who to add. But do just one link per comment, because otherwise the robotic spam-dragon will consume the whole lot of them. Thanks!

3.5 Time Outs: The Sitcom Life

As I’m writing this on Monday and getting it scheduled for Tuesday, it’s occurred to me that Sept. 11th is a serious day. Also my niece’s birthday. Please feel free to commemorate more solemn matters, and come back here to my trivial comedy of a life some other day.

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who has never made me laugh during Mass, but often at other times.

You know those movies where the lead characters acquire the run-down house/school/shop/bus/crematorium, and with the help of a fast-forward film sequence and a peppy soundtrack, they all pitch in and get the place cleaned up in about 2.5 minutes? Complete with a spunky sign to announce their new venture?

I walked through my yard Sunday afternoon, and confirmed I am living in the “before” scene.

So now I just need some colorfully-dressed teenagers and a singing nun to descend on the place and fix it up. Preferably before the Tinkerbell-themed birthday party this weekend.

I’m not winning the holiness award. Because if your group stands up at the start of Mass and warms-up by chanting “Yellow Leather Red Leather”? Yes. I’m going to bust out laughing. In church.

But I’ll try do it quietly. At least until I get to the parking lot. Then I’m going to laugh very loudly. And probably use the Lord’s name in vain, but then quickly convert it into a prayer of some nature, to do a kind of retroactive-save on that decidedly un-holy verbal reflex.

My son is 98% holier than me, or at least 1 chromosome better suited for the priesthood (we knew that), because he kept a straight face the whole mass, and afterwards. I was amazed.

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. . . the Spanish Mass. [Where they do not do tongue-twister warm-ups — we’ve changed scenes completely.] We have a new Spanish priest now, and he does not use the words “Jesus-Christo” and “Salvacion” as often as the previous one. Which means I can no longer understand 5% of the homily, like I used to do under the old regime. I do still like the mariachi mass, though. So perky.

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Still accepting suggestions for additions to the sidebar, so tell me who to add. But do just one link per comment, because otherwise the robotic spam-dragon will consume the whole lot of them. Thanks!

3.5 Time Outs: Back to Civilization

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who persuades me to write whether I ought to or not.

I’m enjoying being home again. No more book-craziness for a while, kids are back to school and so far it’s going well, and I’m 10% less jet-lagged every day. If life stays normal, I might be a civilized person as soon as 2014.

This past week, Julie Davis kept using the word “economics” in sentences directed at me. I remembered vaguely something about having studied these topics in school, and maybe even having some marginal qualifications, and that I had initially started this blog to be about economics and history . . . sheesh.

But the weird thing: All the whole time I was writing the catechist book, I was thinking, “I just need to knock this thing out so I can get back to my *real* project,” which is the homeschooling book.”

[Not on a topic that competes with Rebecca’s topic, by the way. The two books should go together great, so buy hers first.]

And here’s what . . . I realized this weekend that now the homeschooling book has become the “gotta get this outta the way” project. ‘Cause yes. I wanna write about some Christian money issues. So maybe I give myself a week or two to breathe, then do the homeschooling book and just get it done, and then maybe, maybe?, Julie can have an economics blog back?

I dunno. I don’t predict the future with any reliability.

Over at AmazingCatechists.com, I posted about using Christian LeBlanc’s new book as teaching resource for catechists. (Some people were asking when I’d post the catechist-version of that review, so now you know. I cover different topics than I did here.)

I came home with a pile of review materials from the Giant Catholic Conference Thing-y, so it’ll be review-city for a while here. Or there. Somewhere. Did I mention how much I love getting new books? Love it. Love it.

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I was tooling around the Pauline Media booth, and found this book, which looks very handy to keep in stock at crisis pregnancy centers and the like.

And I was thinking, “Wow, my Spanish has gotten much better, because I can read the whole back cover pretty easily.” Also, I considered the fact that I could read it to be a reliable signal that the reading level was very accessible, which is always a plus in my book. But then my plane was very very late getting home Saturday night, so Sunday I went to

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Oh, hey, about those links: It came to my attention that my sidebar is due for some updating. If you read here, leave your link in the combox. I’m going to set a goal of doing the update, let’s say . . . September 23rd? Nope, that’s a Sunday, make it the 24th.

–> FYI I’d love to include not just your personal link, but any recommended sites you think fit with the multitude of themes here. But do just one link per comment, because otherwise the robotic spam-dragon will consume the whole lot of them. Thanks!

Labor Day, Slavery, and the Mercy Project

There’s a pile of us blogging today about The Mercy Project, a non-sectarian effort to free children from slavery in Ghana. I have no affiliation with the project myself, so if you decide to support it financially, do your own due diligence. But I think the project deserves attention as a model for serious anti-slavery efforts.

Why does slavery persist? It is difficult to maintain the unbridled hatred that inspires forced labor camps, Nazi-style. Over the longer run, the humanity of the slave is undeniable; to calmly take lifetime ownership of another person requires the unshakeable certainty that somehow, for some reason, we simply must have slaves. To be convinced it’s an unavoidable fact of life, one of those regrettable difficulties we must chin-up and endure, hand in hand with long work days, mosquitoes, blisters — all that we suffer in this fallen world.

In Ghana, parents relinquish their children in desperation — the alternative is death. [My own former-slave-state’s motto seems to particularly apt. Probably not what the founders had in mind.] The fishermen on Lake Volta who use the children as slaves are in a similar situation: I need this free labor, or I can’t stay in business. The Mercy Project’s method is to think up a village-scaled sustainable new business project that eliminates the financial need for slaves, and then to partner with a particular village to coordinate an emancipation day in conjunction with the implementation of that new opportunity.

[There’s then a process for helping the newly-liberated former slaves to recover from their experience and to rebuild their lives back home with their family of origin, with family assistance to prevent re-trafficking.]

The reported success of the Mercy Project’s first initiative suggests that given any viable alternative, the local slave-owners really are willing to move on to some better business model. You can read about their second project-in-progress here — same model, slightly different details.

So that’s the Mercy Project. Take a look.

Thanks to Heather Hendricks for coordinating the giant blog-a-thon.

What to Read.

I’m here in Dallas (no one told me it was beautiful!) with a slooooow internet connection, so you’ll have to read somewhere else this week. No shortage of options.

Two brand new homeschooling blogs, written by internet friends of mine, that I think are worth a look:

Home Grown is by a Catholic mom of 1, and for all everyone sighs and moans at the sight of large homeschooling families, 1-child families have a dynamic that can be quite challenging for the stay-at-home parent. I love how Susan is up front about the problems she works through. Also, I wish I could write as beautifully as her 4th grader. There’s a reason this blog doesn’t include penmanship samples.

[And so that you’re warned, any snide comments about family size, and I’ll scratch your eyes out. You have no idea. No. idea.]

180 Days of Homeschool is by Amy, a mom of eight, ages baby to senior in high school. She’s been at this homeschooling thing for a while, and the day-by-day approach gives a nice realistic look at what it is homeschoolers really do all day. The other interesting thing for non-homeschoolers to note: by “homeschooling” what we often mean is “sending the kids to school, just not all day every day”. Amy has a few kids taking classes at a home-school school — think private Catholic school, but courses ordered a la carte, much more like college.

On education: If you aren’t already reading Bearing’s tremendously thorough series on the goals of Catholic education, per the Church, check it out.

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On the plane I started reading Grace in the Shadows by Denise Jackson. I read a lot of self-published books for the Catholic Writers’ Guild Seal of Approval process, so I am fully aware of the trepidation one feels in picking such a work. The content on this one is excellent. It’s part-memoir, part no-nonsense talk about the reality of sexual abuse, and how to move forward despite a miserable past. It has a very personal style (there’s poetry, for one thing) that you wouldn’t see in many traditionally-published books, so I’m glad Denise chose to stick to her guns and write it the way she thought it needed to be told.

At the halfway point, I’m giving it a ‘buy’ recommend for anyone who has the job of creating a safe environment for preventing abuse, or has the vocation of being the friend of a sexual abuse survivor. Denise Jackson has a very mature, well-balanced Christian spirituality, and what has fascinated me as I read is seeing how many of the patterns of behavior and emotion surrounding sexual abuse are in fact the same patterns you see in many other situations. Great book. I can’t wait to finish it.

3.5 Time Outs: What Works

Thanks once again to our host, Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who is the picture of patience with his minions. (And he prays for them too. If you’re going to have an overlord, that’s the sort you want.)

My daughter recommends using frozen blueberries instead of ice cubes in your limeade.

We own limeade concentrate because it makes the best margaritas. Cup of ice, one scoop limeade slush, tequila, jiggle it around, done. Best ever.

But apparently the blueberries go over big with the under-21 crowd.

Look, the Darwins have school plans. So do I, but I’m saving my enthusiasm for the first week of September. We did two weeks of remedial Latin at the beginning of this month, then I cancelled class until I was satisfied I was ready for the conference next week, so that I wouldn’t have terrible nightmares about running to the airport and forgetting my shoes, or trying to give out business cards but I forget to get them printed — you know the drill.

What the Darwins do is what I’d do, if I were the Darwins. You know what I mean. They have a good approach. I like it.

Book department update 1.0: I learned last week how important it is to have a book deadline. (Mine is 8/27, approximately 28,000 words.) Because otherwise, I’ll never stop writing. There’s always one more little thing to say. I made myself stop before I hit 30,000, and this week [yes, this week, because even last week, new words kept sneaking in despite my resolve to be done adding anything else, forever and ever amen] I’m using the delete key to clean out the dust.

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Book department update 1.5: My half of the contract is signed. Waiting to get back the copy from the publisher with both signatures on it. Then we’ll be legal, and I’ll have to resist the urge to post something in ALL CAPS because I’ll be SO EXCITED. As you knew I would be. Accountants are never happy until the lines are all properly filled.

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And with that, I’m back to regular life. I’ll keep y’all in my prayers, and I’m trying to work through my blogging backlog in addition to doing all the other stuff I need to do, so look for me to pop in with this or that, time permitting. Have a great week!

(And yes, you can post links. I am, by the way, reading comments. Oh, about once a week, but I am. And trying to reply as well.)

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