Stuff in General

I feel like I now have several things to say that may all be interesting to read about. The first is that my interest, rather negligible up until now, in Gutenberg College has been considerably piqued. It is a very small (48 students) liberal arts college in Eugene, Oregon (2 hours south of us). It features a unique liberal arts education--the same for all students--including in-depth study and discussion of the Great Books from the Bible and Homer to Tolstoy and Joyce, mandatory 2 years of classical Greek and 2 years of German, art classes, music classes, science and mathematics, and other things. What's different about the science and math classes is that they do not focus on lab work and problem-solving so much as on learning how discoveries and theories in these fields, such as the Theory of Relativity, have influenced thought. For someone like me, who doesn't have aspirations for a technical scientific or mathematical field, this would be close to ideal.

I was initially leery of the college because it offers only one major. I was suspicious of this mainly because it was different and unusual, not because I had really considered it. On further inspection, I think it is a rigorous and broad program that would, by God's grace and provided I worked hard, make a quantum leap in my ability to write, reason, and speak. Since that is exactly what I want to do, the curriculum is attractive. :-)

I also get the benefits of being able to come home on any holiday and even weekends if I want, and the University of Oregon's 2.3 million volume library. That could make any book-lover salivate. :D

I will also be visiting my other two primary schools under consideration, Hillsdale and Grove City, in two weeks or so, and at Hillsdale I will meet David (the two "David's...blog"s over on the links bar), and Ashton, both good friends whom I have never met in person. :-)

And, last but not least, I've begun another historical tome on the fall of Berlin, by modern historian Antony Beevor. It staggers my mind, every time I read about it, what monumental agony and mayhem Europe went through considerably less than an average lifetime before now. 7 million German civilians were displaced. The Red Army, over the course of the whole war, lost 9 million men--more than double the population of Oregon, or more than triple the amount of the entire active and reserve forces of the current U.S. military.