@georgeob1,
Quote:Setanta repeatedly puts me to shame.
Yeah, he's a curse on all of us, that boy.
Quote:you likely are a good deal better informed than me about contemporary political events and trends.
I'll say.
Quote:The formal part [in our education] at the start is, in comparison, relatively insignificant in my experience.
Yes and no. Curiosities and habits of mind can be and ought to be stimulated early. In my case, grades 3-5 were incredibly important. My affinity for sentence construction via grammer; my interest in and respect for the scientific/empirical pursuits through the case of Madame Curie (not to mention how her example validated a family presumption that women could do anything men can do); the beginnings of my thinking about civil/human rights, institutional power, ideological rigidity, and morality from our teacher reading Les Miserable; my love of the essay form through reading Charles Lamb, etc., all this and more was cultivated in those early educational experiences and that stuff never left me even in the face of new emerging curiosities such as Jane Mansfield's tits.
