This is news to me. Hillsdale is a conservative college frequently cited in the more conservative news shows, and I have no problem with that. However most K12 schools are public, charter or non-charter, and where I live we hear little about Christian schools, although they exist here.

The boom of which you speak is the mouse's squeak, but loud, not weak. :cool:

It doesn’t seem surprising, given the range of hugely popular nostalgia-driven projects offered by figures like Jordan Peterson, Dr Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke. Isn’t there a recurring trope that since modernity the West has lost its way, thanks to humanism, scientism and post-Enlightenment decadence (particularly the dreaded post-modernism), and that we need to reacquaint ourselves with 'proper thinking' though the classical Western tradition and its values?

This idea also informs many commentators and podcasters, like Douglas Murray and Dennis Prager, Bishop Barron, Michael Knowles, etc, and even the MAGA movement, which is influenced by variations of this framing. Not hard to see how people are wanting to rediscover the roots of Western thinking and find their way back onto the 'correct ' road. I am assuming that this trend is often connected to conservative thinking.

Not hard to see how people are wanting to rediscover the roots of Western thinking — Tom Storm

There's a really good trilogy about that, maybe you've seen it, or heard of it: The Decline of Western Civilization, by Penelope Spheeris.

:up: I can't deal with punk or heavy metal but I see the relevance.

It's an awesome series of movies regardless. They're documentaries, in an anthropological sense. I would say.

Is Bruno Latour a good Catholic, in your opinion?

Since reaching middle age - well gone now! - I've become painfully aware of the deficiencies of my education in 'The Classics'. Reading philosophy and interacting on forums has re-awakened the interest - I feel that Greek philosophy and other classical literature is very much a cultural heritage, but one that has become largely deprecated in today's world. Mind you I'm also aware that had I had it beaten into me with a cane, the way many previous generations did, I would probably have hated it. But at it is, it feels more like a forgotten cache of wisdom.

I am assuming that this trend is often connected to conservative thinking. — Tom Storm

Indeed. And it is rather an inconvenient truth in some ways. The 'perennial philosophers' who hark back to the so-called world wisdom traditions are often arch-conservative, to the point of being reactionary. But then, so much of what is taken for granted - the new normal, so to speak - is wildly radical in their eyes, and we don't see it, because we're immersed in it. For myself, as a long-time critic of the materialism of modern culture, it makes for some odd bedfellows, so to speak. Although I do console myself with the idea that at least there is also a kind of 'traditionalist left' like Jacques Maritain, committed to social justice and effective democracy while also respecting tradition.

There has been a boom in interest in classical education across the US over the past few years, with growth rapidly outpacing other K-12 enrollment in the US. The advance is occuring on several fronts, being a major trend in homeschool settings, private schools, and (to a lesser extent) public charters. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you see this as a positive development? I guess I am ambivalent. Anything that can improve the quality of schools should be good, but putting control in the hands of conservative ideologues strikes me as dangerous, especially these days. I also don't have the reverence for the "western canon" that many do.

Anything that can improve the quality of schools should be good, but putting control in the hands of conservative ideologues strikes me as dangerous, especially these days. — T Clark

:100: :up:

But you changed what he said, and then you approved. That's not a regulatory thing to do.

but putting control in the hands of conservative ideologues strikes me as dangerous, especially these days.

I don't see how a classical education entails this. I am aware that more than a few liberal outlets have put forth hit pieces advancing the theory that "classical education" is simply a "dog whistle" for "racist Christian nationalism," but at least from my main exposure to the movement (e.g. the "Common Place" podcast on Charlotte Mason/classical ed, or "Classical Stuff You Should Know") this seems every bit as unhinged and based on vague guilt by association as the right wing drive to "stop critical race theory from taking over public education." It's something like "look at what some professors/activists at this university have said somewhere else, and look, they're vaguely involved in this charter school over here. And look who donated. It's Soros/the Koch brothers, so it's clearly woke communism/Christian white nationalism!"

Aside from that, the main critique seems to be the a classical education necessarily cuts out "other views." I don't think this is true, and it certainly isn't necessarily true. This seems like people simply jumping to false conclusions, assuming that "classical" must mean "never reading anything that isn't Latin or Greek." But the podcast I mentioned before is by teachers at a classical high school and they talk about teaching the books they discuss, many of which are modern.

Anyhow, this complaint always struck me as somewhat off base, because what is really meant by "diversity?" Are kids in mainline schools reading the classics of other cultures? Confucius, Al Farabi, or Shankara? The Tale of the Genji, Journey to the West, or the Thousand and One Nights? Generally, no. If anything, I'd imagine students might be more likely to read these in a classical setting. (Actually, more and more often, students don't read any complete books anyhow, only short excerpts).

Sometimes "diverse perspectives" seems to mean merely: "more modern books by those with a squarely secular outlook, still from Western countries, but who have ancestry from somewhere other than Europe (or maybe some Western-centered diaspora writing catering to Western audiences). Yet even if one sticks to a narrow view of classical occidental literature, is the range from Scotland to the Persia from 500BC to 1700 or so, really "homogenous" compared to contemporary literature published largely after 1900 in the US by people of differing ethnicities?

The 'perennial philosophers' who hark back to the so-called world wisdom traditions are often arch-conservative, to the point of being reactionary.

Some, yes. Parts of Plato (although other parts are fairly radical, and his mentor was executed for subverting tradition, not defending it), Confucius, Cicero, even Boethius to some degree. But others are fairly radical, challenging existing power structures, for instance Augustine or Dante.

But then, so much of what is taken for granted - the new normal, so to speak - is wildly radical in their eyes, and we don't see it, because we're immersed in it.

Yes, and this is also true to some degree outside of the West. I

The boom of which you speak is the mouse's squeak, but loud, not weak.

Indeed, still quite small. Homeschooling and private education as a whole has blown up since the Pandemic though, so that is part of it.



Maybe, although I somehow doubt that is a major concern of most parents. More a sort of bandwagon to jump on maybe. I do know Desantis sort of jumped on it for Florida but I have my doubts about how successful that will be. It seems like the sort of thing where hiring is very important (the material is complex, although certainly teachable to teenagers), and doing some sort of rapid mass expansion seems liable to make doing the job well quite difficult unfortunately. I don't think simply shifting the curricula probably does much.

However, it's at least an improvement on solely focusing on earnings prospects (and thus future ability to consume as the goal of education), or, in the religious/homeschooling context, a narrow focus on religious education within a fairly small echo chamber.

Homeschooling and private education as a whole has blown up since the Pandemic though, so that is part of it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, it's more than that. I wasn't home-schooled.
Granted, the schools that I went to, weren't very good.
But at least I went to school. That was a basic right that I had, and I'm glad that there was an infrastructure that allow me to do such a thing.

You're mistaken. I didn't change anything; I underlined text for added emphasis.

from what I understand and experienced the norm is to basically have …very little ethics outside of basic obedience — Count Timothy von Icarus

Now there's an oxymoron if I ever heard one.

It doesn’t seem surprising, given the range of hugely popular nostalgia-driven projects offered by figures like Jordan Peterson, Dr Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke. Isn’t there a recurring trope that since modernity the West has lost its way, thanks to humanism, scientism and post-Enlightenment decadence (particularly the dreaded post-modernism), and that we need to reacquaint ourselves with 'proper thinking' though the classical Western tradition and its values? — Tom Storm

Liberal arts colleges and liberal arts professors tend to be very left of center. The move toward STEM subjects was presented as a rigthward pragmatic solution for how the US would be able to keep up with the rest of the world, particularly Asia. There was a also a rightward push toward tech schools, suggesting that education without application was not much worth pursuing. The right is also pushing back hard on loan forgiveness, questioning why the tax payer should pay for the many liberal arts degrees that have limited financial worth. The right presents the view that college professors are elitist liberals, particularly those in the liberal arts' fields.

That is, I don't see a move toward a liberal arts education as a rightward shift. I would think that the future Republican leaders of America would come from the business schools as opposed to the medievel literature departments.

To the extent you're correct that the shift towards liberal arts is really just a move toward religion, then that might be a rightward shift, but I don't consider a college program centered on the great works of Western civilization particularly consistent with a Bible based religious college. The former I would expect to be located in a quaint New England town, the latter in the hills of Southern Appalachia.

How should I know?



I hardly see how this is the case. Obedience to proper authority is part of "right behavior." If children refuse to listen to their parents or teachers, employees refuse to listen to their bosses, citizens refuse to listen to the police or tax collectors, nurses assisting a surgeon refuse to obey the surgeon, cops refuse to obey elected officials, etc. there will be obvious problems.

This is fairly obvious is contemporary American society, where we see police forces (paramilitary organizations) openly heckling what are essentially their commanders-in-chief (i.e., mayors, sheriff's, commissioners) and responding to orders with: "nope, don't feel like doing that," or "maybe if you pay us a large donative we will consider following that order." For instance, when elected officials try to respond to citizens concerns and anger over law enforcement, impunity, etc., a not uncommon response has been for forces to simply to stop doing their jobs in protest.

Simply ignoring the rule of law is another example. Yet such behavior by those in positions of relative authority only makes sense in a frame where the "common good" is merely a means of maximizing the fulfillment of the individuals' desires, and where there is no such thing as "right desire," but merely acts that maximize utility—the fulfillment of existing desire—or fail to.

Unfortunately, because World War II has become something of the foundational mythos of modern Western liberalism, obedience to proper authority has become something of fraught issue. But obedience still gets taught in primary schools because it would be impossible to run them without it. "Don't listen to any authority unless they tell you to do things you want to do," is obviously disastrous though, even with issues as banal as traffic lights and stop signs. But it's also a sort of historical myopia, because many of histories great disasters stem, not from totalitarianism, but from a collapse of authority and precedent. Indeed, often authoritarianism is itself the result of a collapse in proper authority, the strong, but capricious ruler preferable to abject chaos.

E.g., the refrain in the Book of Judges: "In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes," which is particularly noteworthy because the monarchy is not represented as a positive thing, some divinely sanctioned plan for society, but rather a largely negative consequence of the people's inability to abide by the authority of moral law and their collapse into genocidal civil wars.

The former I would expect to be located in a quaint New England town, the latter in the hills of Southern Appalachia.

Right, the dominant mode of Evangelical religious education was to focus heavily on the Bible and particularly on modern interpretations of it. The classical education tends to take a much broader view, centered around the liberal arts, which is why it is sort of a sea change.

It's perhaps important to distinguish it from the subject area of "classics," which focuses pretty exclusively on Greek and Roman culture in antiquity. The traditional liberal arts education is a lot broader than this, it doesn't preclude reading the Brothers Karamazov or Song of Solomon, which are generally considered to be classics of Russian and American literature. What it would do is approach them through a particular methodology and structure.

but putting control in the hands of conservative ideologues strikes me as dangerous, especially these days.
- T Clark

I don't see how a classical education entails this. I am aware that more than a few liberal outlets have put forth hit pieces advancing the theory that "classical education" is simply a "dog whistle" for "racist Christian nationalism," but at least from my main exposure to the movement (e.g. the "Common Place" podcast on Charlotte Mason/classical ed, or "Classical Stuff You Should Know") this seems every bit as unhinged and based on vague guilt by association as the right wing drive to "stop critical race theory from taking over public education." — Count Timothy von Icarus

As I said in my previous post, I'm ambivalent. I don't reject the idea outright, but I don't think concerns about right-wing propaganda are unfounded. For some, "classical education" includes explicit promotion of Christian values, including prayer, in the schools. To be fair, I also think that critical race theory has damaged public discourse here in the US and had something to do with the social and political situation we find ourselves in.

Aside from that, the main critique seems to be the a classical education necessarily cuts out "other views." I don't think this is true, and it certainly isn't necessarily true. This seems like people simply jumping to false conclusions, assuming that "classical" must mean "never reading anything that isn't Latin or Greek." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think for many, classical education includes denying America's racial history. Last time I checked, Florida school curriculum requires describing the benefits black people were provided by slavery.

I've always questioned the theory of life which underlies modern education. It seems geared towards vocation, the development of mechanical faculties for the service of the mechanical organization of society, the primer for drudgery. I feel like it assumes the mistaken anthropology that man is little more than Aristotle's zoon politikon, a state animal, and one ought to be trained in the maintenance of these kinds of institutions.

I suppose the rise and fall of classical education is indicative of the trust and belief in these institutions because it isn't necessarily connected to the maintenance of any of them. I know for myself that I've learned more from how classical writers viewed the world than any bureaucratic curriculum. It's just a shame that I hadn't known of them earlier.

I'm not at all convinced that a "classical education", as worthwhile as it might be, will turn out to be a great benefit to its recipients -- in 2025 going forward. Well, why wouldn't reading 'the great books' and getting sound mathematics instruction be beneficial?

First, there is the world-as-it-is, not the world-as-it-was. There are numerous upheavals under way in all sorts of areas of endeavor--and society at large--and I am just not convinced that being able to read Latin texts, for instance, or having read the Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius (died 524 a.d.) will give a young person that much of a leg-up in life.

Second, the classical education movement is not a solution to the problem which the enterprise of public education has become. I figure that 20% of American students receive very good to excellent education in public schools. 80% are receiving "passable to abysmal" education. Everyone is responsible for this -- the school administrations, the teachers, the students, the parents, and the communities at large (and no one is guilty?).

The 20% who are receiving a very good or better education have their communities, parents and schools to thank.

Third, It makes sense that parents would opt out of public education if an alternative is available. Some religious and non-religious parents have sent their children to Catholic or Lutheran schools (which tend to get better results, not least owing to motivated parents and students). The charter school movement provides an alternative, though (at least in Minnesota) charter schools tend to be inferior to public schools! Some opt for home schooling, some for other parochial education programs.

I attended a public school in small-town Minnesota starting in 1952. What made my public school experience at least reasonably successful was that the school was orderly, students were cooperative, teachers varied from excellent to fair. The community and parents supported the schools. At least acceptable behavior was expected all round.

Decent schools and successful education results are largely bottom up, rather than top down. No matter the administration, teachers, or curriculum, a school can't do much with several hundred to a few thousand "don't give a shit about school" students.

To the extent you're correct that the shift towards liberal arts is really just a move toward religion, then that might be a rightward shift, but I don't consider a college program centered on the great works of Western civilization particularly consistent with a Bible based religious college. — Hanover

You may be right and I'm not agreeing with the OP per say. I'm saying that there seems to be a cultural shift and renewed interest in Western civilisation and the intellectual tradition more broadly. So perhaps there's a trickle down effect. The idea that we need to make the West great again seems to echo Make America Great Again. It seems to me that there's a plethora of nostalgia projects available, in populist and patrician flavours.

Here in Australia, Tony Abbot a former right-wing Prime Minister, even got into the act. He joined the board of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, a private foundation dedicated to promoting a "new golden age" through the study of great books and Western thought. This enterprise is largely motivated by an opposition to identity politics, multiculturalism and contemporary teaching methods. This is attractive to evangelicals and other theists because it venerates tradition and respects the Bible and religion.

I agree with everything you say. Latin used to be a high school course available to those students having aspirations in the medical areas, especially MD prep. That made sense. On the other hand, learning Greek could possibly lead to better understandings of ancient wisdom - which seems a bit superfluous in modern times. As a retired mathematician my familiarity with Greek didn't extend beyond a very useful alphabet.

After all the debate over the years here on this platform over different approaches to reading original texts, it is disappointing to see the scholarly pursuit assigned to a particular class of cultural influence.

I'm saying that there seems to be a cultural shift and renewed interest in Western civilisation and the intellectual tradition more broadly. — Tom Storm

Good news! There are many thick branches of varied thought within that intellectual tradition, and many of them are as good as gold. Find the most reachable limb and pick the best fruit you can find, depending on season and taste.

In order to sample these good fruits, students will have to read widely, an activity which actually entails very little suffering. Spice it up a bit; ancient western civilization isn't only about Plato and Aristotle. Much of the content in Eroticism and Family Life in Ancient Greece and Rome that I took at the U would not be news to a lot of high school students.

Family, community, and school (in that order) can encourage life-long learning. There are SO MANY interesting things to learn, and a long life isn't time enough.

Good news! — BC

Maybe. It might just amount to set dressing for a new production of right-wing authoritarianism. Remember too that classical education was king when colonisation, slavery and institutionalised misogyny and racism were key instruments of power.

I think for many, classical education includes denying America's racial history.

For many, education in general involves denying America's racial history. People who want to do this can and will attempt to do it as much in one education style as any other.

Last time I checked, Florida school curriculum requires describing the benefits black people were provided by slavery.

First, those are guidelines for Florida public schools in general, it has nothing to do with classical schools (which are largely private).

Second, did you read the guidelines in question? The guideline is phrased poorly, but this is a fairly bad misrepresentation.

The offending bullet point in question (the document is not a narrative history) could be taught poorly or well, but I take it the point is that African American slaves were not exclusively menial laborers and that some were able to leverage their skills (indeed, sometimes to aid the abolitionist cause). This is something that can be taught well or poorly, just as teaching that some Jews acted as concentration camp enforcers for the Nazis in exchange for preferential treatment need not be an apologia for death camps (indeed, this detail seems more fraught, but one can hardly call covering it "whitewashing.")

By the metric used by critics though, Mike Duncan's analysis of the Haitian Revolution, which depicts slavery there as nothing short of "Hell on Earth," would also be "whitewashing history," because it discusses the fact that some slaves were able to escape the incredibly lethal agricultural work on the island through their vocations (in turn allowing them to take leadership roles during the Revolt, which is also relevant to how leaders emerged during Reconstruction).

The offending passage is surrounded by guidelines stating that students should be required to read primary sources written by abolitionists and former slaves, learn the history of slave revolts, etc., so, taken as a whole, it is hardly the apologia for slavery it was represented as, and certainly not "slaves benefited from being enslaved," as the Florida teachers' union put it. No doubt, some conservatives do want to whitewash uncomfortable areas of history, but it is almost as unhelpful to demand that they be reduced to manichean narratives and sanitized of any offending complexities.

Remember too that classical education was king when colonisation, slavery and institutionalised misogyny and racism were key instruments of power.

Misogyny and racism have been endemic to the human race throughout history. They aren't exactly a unique product of the West. They are, for instance, present in most of the classics of non-western literature to some degree. But there is also plenty of value there as well.

Anyhow, that's an incredibly broad "guilt by (loose) association" critique. You could just as well argue in favor of it because it was the dominant mode of education for the elite when slavery was abolished, universal education funded, child labor ended, and women's suffrage passed, etc.



I wholeheartedly agree.



Well, what do you mean by "leg up" and "benefit?" I agree that Boethius probably isn't going to help you earn a bunch more money, or be able to consume more (the most common metric for educational success these days). And, if you take him to heart, he probably won't do much for your social status. However, he might remind you that these are ultimately not the most important things in life, or maybe even particularly important things.

I find it a bit ironic that so much of our culture revolves around denigrating elites for their moral failings (a hobby of both the right and the left). Yet we also hear all the time about what a rat race the kids of elite families are forced into. It seems to me that defining success the way we do (largely in terms of power, wealth, and status, without reference to virtue) is a great way to end up with adults who are poor leaders.

Misogyny and racism have been endemic to the human race throughout history. They aren't exactly a unique product of the West. They are, for instance, present in most of the classics of non-western literature to some degree. But there is also plenty of value there as well.

Anyhow, that's an incredibly broad "guilt by (loose) association" critique. You could just as well argue in favor of it because it was the dominant mode of education for the elite when slavery was abolished, universal education funded, child labor ended, and women's suffrage passed, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think my point is not unreasonable. But I am not saying a classical education leads to these things. Nor am I saying that it is merely a Western problem. I'm just saying that the idea that a classical education will improve society is not necessarily the case, given the status of classical education during periods when we were doing our worst.

Perhaps we only began to appreciate diversity and comprehend that more people were worthy of inclusion as citizens when classical education began to wane.

That said, I am not against a classical education, nor am I against the trend of people reading more "great books". I just wouldn't go mistaking it for a way out of our problems just yet. At the very least, I would prefer people to quote Homer for their parables rather than George Lucas.

Well, what do you mean by "leg up" and "benefit?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

he might remind you that these are ultimately not the most important things in life, or maybe even particularly important things. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The rank and file of nations claiming The Western Tradition have never read much of classical literature or whatever counted as The Great Books at any given moment. They usually did not learn Latin or Greek, or anything else in much depth. Were they anti-intellectual proto-MAGA slobs?

No, they were not. They were focussed mostly on staying alive, making ends meet, affording food and shelter for themselves and their children. Their lives were constrained by burdensome circumstances. We have not transcended these circumstances. If lives are less constrained by burdensome circumstances in some countries, those better conditions are nowhere universal.

In a consumer driven political economy, what one ought to do with one's life is a difficult question. There are numerous texts (the Bible among them) which can lead one to understand how the necessary and yet superfluous role of 'consumer' is something of a curse. One works enough to afford the stuff one is expected to consume, and if you don't want the economy to crash, you had jolly well better buy buy buy!

But what is "good work" in this political economy based on consumption? Some of the work I spent 40+ years performing was death on the installment plan, figuratively speaking. Dead; dead end; deadening. There is a shortage of "good work" -- work that is on the face of it productive, clearly useful, meaningful, and paid--the grace of God doesn't put food on the table). Good work exists, certainly; there just isn't a lot of it.

Reading, study, seeking knowledge and understand, etc. can greatly enrich a life, but only the circumstances of the elite 10% to 20% of the population allow it.

The average student from the average family attending the average classically-oriented school will not graduate into the elite (unless his or her parents are already elite, generally) and will not readily put their classical knowledge to use in building a fine meaningful life. They will have to navigate the same crappy consumer political economy as everybody else does who belongs to the mass rank and file, and not to the elite.

If this comes with even the slightest religious indoctrination of children it's not a good thing. The "teachings" that are positive defenses against a chaotic modern life does not need a "...and therefor god" sticker attached to it. These children might get some good preparation for life, but they might also end up in a perpetual existential crisis as they're later thrown into the modern world as adults. It doesn't matter then that they had some good stuff in their education when their religious indoctrination becomes a major source of conflict with the world.

The question should rather be why regular, secular and liberal education free from nationalistic and religious indoctrination, aren't well versed in teaching philosophical ideas and reflection. The major problem in education today is that it tries to force feed pure data (information) into kids like they're hard drives to fill and that this is the way to prepare them, when in fact its the right questions about life and the world that needs to be taught for them to be fully functioning. Kids learn the basics of reading, writing math, society and science pretty early on, but without teaching them to be curious they become slaves of society rather than individuals with independent thought.

It's the inability to think for themselves that makes these children, as later young adults, incapable of distinguishing facts from reality, shaping them into slaves for algorithms and social media influencers who tell them to jump and they jump. Because they didn't learn critical thinking properly. They didn't get enough responsibility for their own existence.

Education must also be put into perspective of how parents today overprotect their children through almost neurotic chaos. Just today I read an article about the Canadian scientist Mariana Brussoni talking about how parents today are so overprotective of their children that they don't develop a proper ability of independence. And couple that with reflections made on young generations becoming adults far later than normal, showing child-like behaviors far into early adulthood. Education then, has unfairly gotten too much critique for failing younger people as parents have somewhat lost the ability to actually raise children in a way that prepares them for life.

Then again, US education overall isn't a good place to look for what good education should be. The fact that education quality is so dependent on economic class differences between children and families in society makes evaluating what is good or not for children problematic as there's not really a standard that can be set that properly analyze the result of the education.

Fundamentally, a free, quality education for all children, regardless of who they are is not only what's best for children, but also society as a whole. That the US doesn't realize how much of their societal problems could be prevented by just having an education on par with a nation like Finland (who ranks highest in the world), is quite remarkable. The inability of adults in society and politicians to listen to scientists and philosophers on the causal link between quality education for all and improvements to society both in terms of economics and living standards is remarkable.

So, before praising religious schools for acting like a broken clock striking correct with this, the question and challenge is far wider and more serious for US schools overall. Finland is far ahead of the US in terms of educational quality for all children, but even in this state there are challenges to improve further. Maybe the US needs to first just adopt a modern understanding of education and its role in society as a means to lift up the general population as a whole before getting to the details of the educational quality in general.

The offending bullet point in question (the document is not a narrative history) could be taught poorly or well, but I take it the point is that African American slaves were not exclusively menial laborers and that some were able to leverage their skills (indeed, sometimes to aid the abolitionist cause). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sorry to be harsh, but this is outrageous. You can find someone who benefits in some way from any set of conditions. I have a friend who was raped when she was a teenager and had a child. Although this event has had a terrible impact on her life in some ways, it has also made her a strong and committed advocate for vulnerable children. That commitment has had a strong positive impact on her life. Should we be talking about the benefits of rape for the victims?