It’s About Making Babies!

I check my Bloglines.com list of blogs for updates each day, sometimes a couple times a day. In addition to Crystal’s ‘Boobs, Injuries, and Dr. Pepper‘, I watch Scott Adams’ ‘The Dilbert Blog‘, ‘Davezilla.com’, NML’s ‘Baggage Reclaim‘, Annie’s ‘Smart at Love‘. Well. I subscribe to several others, too. I also subscribe to Quotes of the Day, four random quotes from the public domain.

According to Quotes of the Day today:

A. E. Housman

“In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.”

Robert Frost

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”

Some days the quotes are so obvious they hardly seem worth mentioning. Other times they seem less relevant than the color of the egg that the snake that got run over on the highway yesterday was hatched from.

Frost’s observation about education startled me. I hadn’t considered that aspect of what education does to a person, although I know that college claimed to change people, and seemed to. Not to make a persone ‘more’, but different than they started. Just as travel broaden’s one (the mind, the mind, never mind the world class bread pudding on the Holland America Cruise Lines ‘Vollendam’.), high school and university classes examine horizons for unexpected details, challenge what we ‘know’ to be true, and teach us to look within and without. Often lacking in skills, the college student even after the first year or two will have a different perspective on life and living.

But education as a way to bolster the self confidence of a population? It makes sense. And looking at how the US established mandatory education to grade 8 or age 16, this seems an immensely powerful thing to do. To take a nation of people drawn from other nations, and by teaching their young to raise up not just a common base of knowledge to enable reasoned participation in democratic government, but to also make the individuals more secure, less prone to panic or rage. What amazing leaders they were to recognize and meet the need for such a strong foundation.

The leaders of America, back when mandatory education was established, deliberately set about to replace the reverence and belief in a monarchy that other nations practiced. In it’s place they began building a belief in the worth (vote) of each individual citizen.

Wow.

Now I re-read Houseman’s comment on Americans with innocence and cunning. Perhaps the innocence is less a naive disregard for the threats of the world, and more a self confident, educated citizen’s understanding of their ability to overcome obstacles. Perhaps this is a less obvious restating of Frost and the early US government.

Two bold thoughts on the day! Not bold, I suppose, since they are not expressing defiance, there doesn’t appear to be any hostility, and they aren’t challenging any edifice of standing. And yet, the feeling of honoring a hero still remains.