Gunman Claims 27 Lives in an Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut!

Dear Commons Community,

Once again a crazed gunman with easy access to weapons enters a school and takes the lives of innocents.  The Daily News reported:

Twenty-seven people were killed, including 18 children, when a masked gunman unleashed a bloody rampage through a Connecticut elementary school.

The mass murderer, packing a pair of weapons, was among the dead at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. — a small suburban town of about 27,000 people.

The gunfire erupted around 9:40 a.m. inside the main office and soon spread to the morning kindergarten classroom — where class began just 35 minutes earlier.

A 9-year-old girl reported hearing a scream come over the school intercom during the yet-unexplained killing spree by the lone gunman. The shooter was described as a 20-year-old man with ties to the school.

Once the horrified surviving students were hustled to safety, an entire class of kids remained missing, the Hartford Courant reported.

The small children wept and held hands while fleeing the school.

Our hearts are with the victims and their families!!!

Tony

 

In Ignorance We Trust: Timothy Egan on History, the Liberal Arts and Florida’s Governor Rick Scott!

Dear Commons Community,

Timothy Egan has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times presenting the importance of learning history as a critical part of a good basic liberal arts education.  He covers a lot of ground and wanders a bit  but saves his best shot for Rick Scott, the Governor of Florida:

“For knuckleheaded refinement look to the state of Florida, a breeder of bad ideas from its dangerous gun laws to its deliberate attempts to make it hard for citizens to vote. Gov. Rick Scott’s task force on higher education is now suggesting that college students with business-friendly majors pay less tuition than those in traditional liberal arts fields.

“You know, we don’t need a lot of anthropologists in this state,” the governor said in October. “I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering and math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on.”

Notice he said “all.” If the governor, who’s been trying to run Florida like a corporation, had applied the skills of the liberal arts, his approval rating might be higher than 38 percent. Any anthropologist could tell Scott how he misread human behavior in the Sunshine State.”

In an effort to be balanced, Egan refers to David McCullough:

“And yet, as McCullough has said, the keepers of academic gates in these fields are their own worst enemies. Too many history books are boring, badly written and jargon-weighted with politically correct nonsense. There are certainly exceptions among the authors — the witty Patricia Limerick at the University of Colorado, for example, or the prolific Douglas Brinkley at Rice. And I defy anyone to read Robert K. Massie’s “Catherine the Great” (enlightened German teenager takes over Russia) or Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts” (Nazis, oozing evil in diplomatic circles) and not come away moved.”

Important commentary!

Tony