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.
Friend shared this with me. I'm a long fan/reader of Franz Kafka. Visited a few of his offices and locations in Prague about 7 years ago. Prague itself was lovely and enjoyable, but Kafka is a fun portion in and of himself while in Prague.
Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, was walking through a park one day in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favourite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully.
Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back to look for her.
The next day, when they had not yet found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter "written" by the doll saying "please don't cry. I took a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures."
Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka's life.
During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll carefully written with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable.
Finally, Kafka brought back the doll (he bought one) that had returned to Berlin.
"It doesn't look like my doll at all," said the girl.
Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: "my travels have changed me." The little girl hugged the new doll and brought the doll with her to her happy home.
A year later Kafka died.
Many years later, the now-adult girl found a letter inside the doll. In the tiny letter signed by Kafka it was written:
"Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way."
Brief hello and update! Good Morning! This may be long, but I spent a lot of time over the past few days having sports conversations and thinking about my growth and youth. So this may be broad and not overly specific in some ways. It's more of a combination of open conversations with friends who have happily swung by to speak and get together to see if I'm holding my head together and speech well.
I am slowly working on the reading, writing and updating. Will keep things as simple as possible. Some things are actually going way better even today than I'd expected! A few personal family and home things - oof. LOL. Frustratingly slow and asking help as words are struggled or forgotten, and I'm slowly reviving others which work!
Sorry if some of you have, or have families, friends or others who have had similar health issues like mine. I am not trying to make anyone feel bad or feel the need or desire to discuss. If I do speak about my situation in any way, I'm just happy to say what even others in my family have asked me to avoid raising. Mainly because I feel nice openly discussing as i need to work out the details! Hoping for great things as I may need to work through it all!
Just for the sake of argument, let's pretend that public secondary education is meant to produce competent youth with good citizenship. That's an impossible goal, but a good idea.
But the US anyway, "higher ed" can mean almost anything from pure job-training to deep explorations of the liberal arts with higher STEM things (not job training, but more intellectual adventure for young adults).
Thus "college" has no specific meaning in the US now.
Temperamentally, I always had respect for my elders despite some adolescent rebellion and stupidity which lasted too long.
In college, we all had to read The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Code of Hammurabi, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Hesiod, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Old Testament, and lots of more modern things like Plato. Foundational things. Yeah, parts of the New Testament too. Good (required) intro to everything wonderful. I had a good liberal arts education but we were too young and stupid for it.
Do American colleges have lots of lectures nowadays - not for credit, but just for general interest outside of politics? I don't know. I am grateful for Youtube.
I was interested then, but it was more dutiful. Now I have a different sense of time. Gilgamesh feels recent.
This guy tells you lots about the Gilgamesh epic but too little of the story and maybe too much about the archeology. All fun:
Recently, I was sent by my company to a class to learn how to improve my negotiation skills. I'm actually pretty good at negotiation. In the class (of 8 people) I scored 3rd highest - which I thought was "very good" but was told "those who do best are the ones who do the worst and learn the most." So maybe I wasn't as successful as I thought. In fact, I learned afterwards I'm more 'sales' than 'negotiator'. Useful skills in leading up to a negotiation, but sales can derail a negotiation (as I learned to my surprise).
I will never again confuse sales with negotiation. Which I have always done. I did not see them as fully separate skill sets - until now.
I always felt negotiation is a part of the sale. I learned the hard way it's not. Basically, negotiation is about firmness, employing the proper behaviors as called for within the context of the discussion, and doing what is appropriate.
In 1969, a survey by Martin Trow for the Carnegie Commission found that college faculties were fairly evenly split politically, with about three left-of-center faculty to every two right-of-center. By the end of the twentieth century, 30 years later, that had become a five-to-one ratio. This advantage allowed the Left to ensure that virtually all new professorial appointments were leftists. Accordingly, the left-to-right ratio began to rise sharply. It went from five-to-one to about eight-to-one in just five or six years, a startling change in so short a time. It’s now probably something like 15 to 1, and still rising.
When recruiting is focused so heavily on political ideology, you don’t simply wind up with academic scholars who happen to be all politically left: what you really get is political activists, not academic scholars. Scholars are defined by intellectual curiosity, but that’s the last thing you’ll find in political activists.
Recently, I've had a number of bad events occur. Supposedly, these things happen in threes, and I'm hoping that's how it goes. I won't share the first two event details. Needless to say they are both very upsetting and expensive events. The third event was VERY expensive. And very avoidable.
What made it particularly galling was how it happened to me, someone who is ridiculously careful online because among the roles of previous jobs I've held, one has been the management of online privacy and data. Compelling partner companies to take extra effort, steps or other precautions to protect user data and information.
If your company is like mine, you take tests each year to identify several different forms of potential identity capture. Phishing, Spearphishing, downloading Trojan horses, etc. There are many ways to do it, and I'm familiar with all of them. I've always passed these tests with flying colors, and I've even caught several transgressors over the years.
Before I tell my own, very humbling, story, let me say this kind of event is not just an issue of being online. My stepmother is not as adept online as I am, so does not engage the internet to nearly the degree I do. Yet several years ago she was scammed out of several thousand dollars in attempting to do something good for her grandchild - so she thought. Unfortunately, she (much like I am about to detail) missed one or two key details in her situation, and fell victim to a con over the phone. Anyone can be a victim.
The Court's interest in revisiting racial affirmative action got me thinking a bit more about the idea of meritocracy.
Merit, say, for employment in my field, is relatively easy to assess. We want to hire people who are personable enough to be good colleagues, bright, eager, good writers and speakers, and easily-trainable. If they don't work out, they have to leave. We do not care about your golf game.
So, in my view, merit has to do with the right fit for a job or task. The right talent stack, as Adams would put it.
I know that many private secondary schools (the PSSAT) and, of course, still most higher ed wants test scores. The SAT and ACT are basically proxies for IQ or, at least, functional IQ as it has to be applied to a test. But is IQ a measure of general merit as a human being? Of course not. It matters, but how much?
Let's say you are head of admissions at a competitive higher ed school with far more applicants than spaces. Your job is to try to field a group of smart kids with enough talents to field sports teams, an orchestra, some math geniuses, etc. Fill each bucket.
I do not know how anyone can claim to be a "good citizen of the USA" without knowing what the organizational structure is all about, from the local to the federal.
All the old liberal virtues — disinterested inquiry, due process, colorblind justice, advance according to merit, not some extraneous racial, ethnic, or sexual quota — all that has been rebranded as the invidious patent of reactionary and therefore impermissible vice. In sum, the educational establishment in its highest reaches is today a cesspool, contaminating the society it had been, at great expense, created to nurture.
Still, parents are willing to climb naked over broken bottles and impoverish themselves to send their children to this cauldron of iniquity. The light from those extinguished stars still, for a short while yet, beams down upon us, and people still utter the words “Harvard,” “Yale,” “Princeton” with something approaching awe.
Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen argues that a true education in the liberal arts is first and foremost not about pointing fingers but learning how to overcome one’s own weaknesses, malice, and addictions, which is hard work. The humanities provide countless models of thought, feeling, and behavior to compare and contrast and use as points of reference. Said Newman, “If then a practical end must be assigned to a university course, I say it is that of training good members of society.” If Newman was right, the humanities are less like parsley and more like the main course.
We do not know what "college" or "higher ed" mean anymore. I used to think of "college" as referring to Liberal Arts, but I am way out of date. Wasn't a liberal arts education always an elite thing except for the very curious and self-educated?
Lots of Higher Ed is work- or career-related these days.
The family is the most exclusive private association known to man, and, as Plato knew, it is the single greatest obstacle to collectivism. Families are inward looking units that resist government-imposed homogenization, and they are an inherently conservative cultural force that seek to preserve the private manners and mores of each and every particular family. Worse: families are the origin of private property, the division of labor, inequality, and gender roles. The family is a naturally occurring social unit that has always stood against the State in its attempt to collectivize the community for either reactionary or progressive ends. Figuratively speaking, every family is protected by a virtual “No Trespassing” sign barring entry.
The success of government schooling and its ultimate goals therefore require the families ties between parent and child be weakened if not broken...
The post is at Chronicle (of Higher Ed). It is annoying to me that so many links are through paywalls or "register to read the whole thing." I understand why they do it, but it would make me happier if they did not. For another example, Epoch is an excellent news source. If I had to pay for every news source just for myself, it would cost plenty of money. Besides that, I would be linking things our readers could not read.
It's a complex question, especially in US higher ed.