Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens birthday today...

That most witty and accessible of American writers, Samuel Longhome Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was born on the 30th of November 1835. 

Probably most read are those most wonderful icons Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, but Twain wrote a great deal of other books - he still is in fact one of America's most prolific writers - and the topics he has touched upon in his writings span almost all aspects of life.

"And why would one write about Twain on a blog on educational technology?", one might ask... because Twain had a thing or two to say about education... the technology of his day was the schoolboard, on which he had to say the following:

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.

Following the Equator; Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar

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"To be good is noble, but to teach others how to be good is nobler--and less trouble." 

Doctor Van Dyke speech, 1906

The first quote brings me to another reason why I believe that Twain has earned a spot on a VUB blog: his attitude towards God and religion. Though born in a family of believers, Clemens was what we would now call a 'free thinker' who questioned organised religion and the outward aspects of it. He wrote, for example, "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be – a Christian."

But he was not an agnost - nor did he ever reject his beliefs! He made that all-important distinction between believing and religion: "Faith is believing; what you know ain't so," and as such, he fulminated often against missionaries who abused faith for the suppression of others. Twain was also Freemason, a member of the Polar Star Lodge No. 79 in St.-Louis.

All of the above, but most of all the days of fun Mark Twain's books gave me, and millions like me, until this day, make that he deserves to be remembered here!