We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Americans tend to prefer to care more about the details of their personal lives than about national politics, but at some point they can feel kicked enough to wake up. At some point, people realize that they might not be too interested in Washington, but that Washington effects them more than they wish. Kick, kick, kick.
I have never understood how higher ed got into the business of remedial education because it is about high school- level work. I suppose we all know why colleges accept kids who cannot do some high school-level tasks.
If you can not produce a grammatical, coherent, and well-structured essay, or do trig and pre-calc, you are likely not ready for a higher ed curriculum. Sensibly, a North Carolina pilot project is moving remediation to the high schools. At that point, it's not remediation, just more high school.
Well, you have to laugh. Socrates would have laughed, because these children are 100% immersed in Enlightenment Western Civ, and don't even want to know what it is or where it came from. I have seen plenty of willful ignorance in my life, but this has to take the cake. SAT-bright students, voting for ignorance of Homer, Plato, the Old Testament, Paul, Beowulf, Augustine, Aquinas, Lorenzo de Medici, Michelangelo, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Newton, Adam Smith, Martin Luther, Locke. Wow. They won't know bupkus and thus will not be worth a serious conversation.
And since all of modern physics, chemistry, medicine, and engineering are aspects and products of Western Civ too, perhaps they might consider eliminating those oppressive white male patriarchal things.
Ignorant kids, standing on the shoulders of giants while denying it. Fascinating phenomenon, the hubris of ignorance.
If I were there with a microphone and videotape, it would be fun to ask them what civilization they might prefer to know - or live in.
No. It is a very rare Leftists who will tell you what the proper end point is for the expansion of government power and money. The answer is always "more."
Climate models appear to have no predictive capacity. Very short-term meteorological models have some use, but are often wrong. Economic models are famously wrong. Ordinary common sense people like me anticipated, planned for, and profited modestly from the internet bubble and the housing bubble. Not the professional math geniuses. Why not?
Best (hypothetical) line to the students: "Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you."
The most important finding in psychology in the last 50 to 100 years, I would say, is the finding that everything you can measure is heritable. The heritability coefficients vary between 0.3 and 0.6, or 30 to 60 percent of the variance, under some assumptions, can be explained by the genes. It’s the largest piece of variance we can explain.
I had to get halfway through the piece tor realize that she is talking about kids in college. Forget about "not prepared for college." These kids are not "college material." Sure they can be graded, as "unacceptable."
We too-easily forget that 50% of people have below-average IQs.
The problem actually first surfaced very early in the history of the republic. The occasion was the War of 1812, in many ways an adjunct conflict to what may be considered the first “world war”: the struggle against Napoleon and the pernicious ideals of the French Revolution. It was the crying manpower need of the British Royal Navy in that protracted conflict -- which led to the British boarding American merchant vessels and impressing American sailors into naval service on the grounds that anyone born an English subject would always be one -- that precipitated the war. However, most of the major actions of the war took place along the frontier between the U.S. and Canada...
Some higher ed is work training, some is general education, and some is a mix. It is the "general education" part, aka Liberal Arts, that most people mean by "an educated person." Can you discuss Plato? And Aristotle, sorry to tell you New Age profs, is the foundation of everything. De Poetica? Yeah! Have to read it.
What that has devolved into today is anybody's guess.
Oftentimes Wikipedia can provide a handy overview of a topic or an idea which helps me orient myself in my thinking about it. By contrast, ye olde Encyclopedia Britannica was verbose, rambling, and not well-organized for a clear overview. Just my opinion, of course.
The old one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia did that better. I relied on it when I was young.
Yesterday we were amused to see people freaking out about swastikas in a production of The Producers (!). Also, complaints about a play about the Orient Express ("Orient" is a racist word, and the train is all about shameful Travel Privilege). Sure seems to be a lot of pain and anger in the bullies these days, and a lot of spineless grow-ups too.
Today's Krazy Kontest will not be a list of all the things the moonbats want to ban or abolish. At the request of reader, it will be about Predictions for future kraziness.
So what do you think will be next on the Krazy front? (Thought crimes, bannings, genderisms, new racisms, microaggressions, etc)
To make his case, Harris must commit along the way what for many is intellectual heresy. It has long been the position of science that the descriptive and the prescriptive spring from entirely separate realms of human experience. The thinking is that science deals only with the descriptive—with facts. Science can tell us what the facts are, but it can never tell us what we ought to do in a moral sense. Rather, the latter is the exclusive domain of religious and philosophical discourse, a normative universe the morally indifferent instruments of science can never penetrate. This position is most associated with David Hume. Hume argued that statements of fact (“your mother gave birth to you”) can never lead to moral conclusions (“so you should be nice to your mother”). Yet against the cautions of Hume, Harris attempts to prove that it is in fact possible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’.
Harris is very clear about his mission. To use his own words: he is not merely saying that “science can help us get what we want out of life.” (p. 28) Harris is arguing that science can “help us understand what we should do and should want—and, therefore, what other people should do and should want...” (p. 28) These are very different claims. The first is uncontroversial and rather obvious; the second is impossible. Harris is arguing for a “science of morality” (p. 27) that will provide humanity with the necessary toolkit to discover what is objectively right and wrong, and pinpoint a universal conception of human values. In advancing this science of morality, however, Harris takes enormous liberties in logic...
Science can tell me what I should want? What? Science is not my Mommy, and if my Mom had raised me scientifically I would probably be insane..
A strong case can be made for a core curriculum for college undergraduates to serve as a corrective to the excesses of cafeteria-style elective systems and politicized identity politics. But the genre of triumphalist Western history, beginning with Homer and Athens and culminating in liberal democracy and free enterprise, of the kind represented a generation or two ago by popularizers like Will and Ariel Durant and Daniel Boorstin, was always crude presentist propaganda. We do not need a Western Civ 2.0 in which the ancient Greeks and Romans and Hebrews and medieval Christendom are part of a grand historical narrative that concludes with the triumphant technolibertarianism of Silicon Valley.
I understand Michael Lind's critique, but I feel it is a trivial one. If people do not know the foundational origins and concepts from the Bible and Aristotle through John Locke and Adam Smith, it seems to me that there is very little that you can read with understanding. It is no "triumphalist narrative," but just the story of how we got where we are. At's a map.
I don't get why anybody would want to pay for higher ed without this. I was the fortunate beneficiary of 2 years of it.
One of the grave errors of the modern mind – an error found in America in the presumptions, assertions, and actions of “Progressives” from Woodrow Wilson through Barack Obama – is the belief that society must, or should, be engineered. This principal belief naturally entails the subsidiary beliefs that the engineering must be done by the state, and that in doing its engineering the state must ignore, or even destroy, any forces of social organization that hamper state-officials’ social-engineering efforts.
A great deal of legislation and, especially, law in a free society is inevitably inconsistent with the blueprints of social engineers. And so, in their unreflective and unscientific presumption that society has no self-organizing forces, the social engineers are blind to the logic of the law and to the importance of legal processes. The social engineers therefore do not see – because their blindness prevents them from seeing – the benefits that emerge over time through the operations of decentralized, spontaneous-ordering forces. The social engineers’ designs and intrusions destroy, or at least severely weaken, these forces. But being blind to these forces, the social engineers are blind to what they destroy.
Were I a Stanford alum, I'd never give them another penny. Not that they need it anyway.