Answers about Education

[angiecoffin85]

OED gives the etymology from educare and the base Latin form would be educo but this had/has two different senses. The first is the rearing or raising of children, livestock, comparable to modern sense, and the second is to draw or lead out, to bring before a court, to raise, to bring up the rear, etc. I like what the second sense brings with the image of a civilized human being being drawn out of a great ape with a language facility.

The park spans 375 hectares with visitors able to watch surfers attempt the Eisbach wave on the Eisbachwalle River, or enjoy spectacular views from the Monopteros, a small Greek temple folly at the top of a hill.  There is no ‘shoulders back, heads up’ nowadays. No ‘keep calm and carry on’. Just ‘me, me, me’ – as exemplified by research conducted earlier this year by The Times, in which just 11 per cent of Gen Z (young adults aged 18-27) said they would be willing to fight for their country.

As the administration continues to wage its war against the school, Kristi Noem also said last month that the school would lost its ability to enroll foreign students should it fail to comply with the demands. But for all the jollity, all the smiles and uplifting stories, I could not escape a nagging sense of sadness. A bitter feeling that it was all just a veneer, a performance rather than a true expression of solidarity. I have no doubt that his experience was by no means unusual.

We wave our little flags today, pile the cream and jam on our scones, chink our teacups. But what that generation endured is hard to fathom, decades on. No technology, no phones, relatively basic medicine, no touchy-feely therapy sessions. It was do or die; you had no choice but to get on with it. It’s not just that the few remaining veterans of the Second World War are very much in the twilight of their years, or that the woman who led that generation through their darkest hours with her parents – Queen Elizabeth II – is gone.

Watching the Red Arrows, seeing the faces of the crowd, listening to the stories of the veterans, I felt a sense of wistful longing for a nation, a people, a spirit and, above all, a clarity of purpose that I fear no longer exists. And may never exist again. How many of them will play their part in ridding the world of a true evil? How many will stand up for what’s good and right, regardless of their own sacrifice? How many will still rise to their feet, two years shy of their 100th birthdays, to salute the marching band?

How they ever managed to go on to live anything even resembling a normal existence is a mystery to me. But somehow, they did. They knew the value of life, you see, understood how precious and precarious it is. They had survived: they owed it to those who did not to keep going.

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