I have an extremely annotated version of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire<\/b> at home. It’s one of those books that I keep on a table and glance at now and then. In the midst of my occasional glancing I’m starting to see why that book was such a classic. In addition to describing the intricate doings of the Mediterranean world some 18 centuries ago, Gibbons interlaces the boring details with great insights about TWIG (The World In General). Here’s a quote that is very troubling to an eternal student<\/b> like myself, but is nevertheless valuable as a reality fix:<\/p>\n
the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.<\/i><\/p>\n
Yea, natural learners just learn; their teachers pretty much just go along for the ride. For everyone else, learning is a huge, distasteful struggle. Been like that since the days of the Roman Empire, probably well before. Yea, I guess that we eternal students are a fragile minority<\/b>. It’s too bad. Hey world, you don’t know what you’re missing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have an extremely annotated version of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at home. It’s one of those books that I keep on a table and glance at now and then. In the midst of my occasional glancing I’m starting to see why that book was such a classic. In addition to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}