From the November 26 Des Moines Register:

Neighbors' Dreams in Small-Town Iowa
by Mike Kilen

...The skivvies road trip was launched thanks to Robert Dorgan, the director of the nonprofit Institute for Small Town Studies in Fairfield. Dorgan wrote in the institute's journal "fishwrap" that in all of Jefferson County there is only one place to buy ( Read more... )

"I think it's because government has become our god... We trust it to inspect our food, we trust it to educate our children..."
- Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher, p. 77

When I went to visit my friend Sue's family in Mississippi when we were in college her great aunt started talking about the black people in her town. "I let one touch me once," Sue's great aunt said with the same mixture of revulsion, fascination, and horror in her voice that my editor used to talk about nursing. Sue's great aunt was disgusted by ( Read more... )

Blatantly stolen from HE&OS:

Will Smith says he and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith homeschool their children because the most valuable things he learned he didn’t get from school. “The date of the Boston Tea Party does not matter,” Smith told Reader’s Digest. “I know how to learn anything I want to learn. I absolutely know that I could learn how to ( Read more... )

Act II: Scene...Lights up, and a student (age unimportant) is crossing the stage slowly, examining the schedule for first day of school (fifth grade, seventh grade, whatever). The subjects are lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery, disconnected, disintegrated. Sure, the student can hit them all, but so what? At the end of the day it's just a ( Read more... )

People whose concept of ancient history is the first series of Star Trek
may be treated with patience, because it's usually not their fault they
were reduced to getting their education from school.
        -- (Terry Pratchett, alt.books.pratchett)

There are a bunch of other Terry Pratchet quotes here.

"We say we believe in marriage, but half our marriages end in divorce," he began. "We say we love our children, but look how we let them live. We say we believe in the family, but you don't see it in the way we behave. You can say a lot of things about Americans, but 'they're happy' is not one of them."
- Wade Davis in Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher; p ( Read more... )

We shouldn't confuse our own fatigue with the actual state of the struggle.
- Alan Keyes

This is something I've been thinking about doing for a while. I don't know if I can be diligent enough to do one EVERY day, but I'm going to give it a shot, so here goes nothin'.
If we live as if we have no duty to the land and the agrarian traditions of the people who live there, then we ought to be ashamed to call ourselves conservatives. We are ( Read more... )