In the latest of many pre-recorded podcasts while Victor is touring in Israel, Jack Fowler reads listener questions on Education, the Monarchy, Transgender people, and how to convince the Left they are the ones responsible for current problems of today.
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Thank you for clarifying your views on inductive and deductive reasoning. I think you’re missing an important point regarding both forms of reasoning. Consider geometry. You start with a flat plane, add in some useful notions like the assumption/assertion of a point and a straight line, and after a lot of thought and critical thinking, you can deduce that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. Add in a few more concepts, like area, you can readily derive the Pythagorean theorem. All of this rests on the initial assumptions about a flat plane. The same sort of reasoning underlies spherical trigonometry, but none of the fundamental results for the flat plane apply on the surface of the sphere. The student learns from this the importance of understanding the key role played by the initial assumptions. This is also true for inductive reasoning, but here the assumptions are hidden in your treatment of the empirical evidence. For example, the utopian wing of progressive thought believes that material wealth will change human nature for the better. Sowell, you, and I, think otherwise. We think something can be learned from history because human nature persists. The key is that neither form of reasoning is useful if the underlying assumptions are not understood and relevant. Indoctrination, as practiced in our universities, assumes the result. It is not “deductive”, just circular.
Re 13 yr old and classics:
From a 7-12 educator’s perspective:
Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, Greek Way, Roman Way
Hunger Games
Percy Jackson
Le Guins Earthsea
Odyssey Fagles Translation
Gilgamesh
maybe Euripides Bacchae or Sophocles Antigone Fagles translation
Plautus’ plays Penguin Edition
Shakespeare Julius Caesar
Virgil’s Aeneid Fagles translation Argonautica Penguin Edition
Plato Apology maybe the Criteus if she’s into Atlantis
Medieval lit
Volsunsaga Penguin Edition
Beowulf Seamus Heaney’s translation
Mabinogion Penguin Edition
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Tolkien Translation
The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings
Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn
The Chronicles of Narnia
Fiction by classacists
Lud in the Mist Hope Mirlees
The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde
That mention of the comic book-oh, sorry, “graphic novel”-to introduce a kid to our culture’s great literature reminds me that that is not a new idea. It takes me back to Classics Illustrated, and other comic books, that presented content from the Western body of literature to kids who might not otherwise crack a book. Any way we can expose them to it!
Yes. When I taught the Odyssey to 7th graders, the comic was an excellent “crib”. Frank Miller’s 300 was also a great chance to do some “history vs Hollywood” with high schoolers. They loved being able to “aaaactuallllly” on everything from the othismos to heroic nudity in Greek Art to the Grecco-Persian Dichotomy.