Continuous Education..........

Friend David has an extensive collection of The Teaching
Company's The Great Courses on CD.  He has been kind enough to allow me to dip into it from time to time.  Lately I've been listening to the Books That Have Made History: Books the Can Change Your Life series.  The authors of those life changing books included Plato, Mill, Malory, von Goethe, Thoreau, Gibbon, Acton, Cicero, Gandhi and Churchill.  Yeow.

So it was with great interest that I read this recent essay by Victor Davis Hanson (thanks to whoever led me there - my apologies for not remembering and crediting you). VDH reminds us that "the mind is a muscle.  Without exercise, it reverts to mush."  His solution - to read the great literature. 

"There is an arrogance of an age that comes with access always to better stuff. New technology prompts an assumption that there are always better things to come. Not true. Life was far better in Rome in AD 25 than in AD 425. Would you like to buy a house in Detroit today or in 1940? Me? I would rather drive down the central section of 101 in 1970 than tomorrow. Regress - material, intellectual, and moral - can be as common as progress, if each new generation proves a poor custodian of the laws, behavior, knowledge, and learning inherited from those now gone."