Saturday, July 26, 2008

Here's some wise advice and an observation about schools, which have only gotten worse:

"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."

"Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents." George Bernard Shaw, born on this date in Dublin, Ireland (1856-1950). He wrote plays about ideas when everyone else was writing sentimental melodramas.

Shaw's plays include Man and Superman (1905) and Saint Joan (1923). But he's best known for the play Pygmalion (1912), about a phonetician named Henry Higgins who teaches a cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle to pass as a lady.

It’s very interesting to me that Pygmalion was published in 1912, the year that Colorado adopted our wonderful caucus-assembly system for nominating to the primary ballot, which has given thousands of ”Eliza Doolittle” common people to become elected representatives.

Do you know the name of the movie that was based on Shaw’s play Pygmalion? I’ll take the first 3 people who email me the answer to John@JohnWren.com to lunch here in Denver. But please, no pigs.

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