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.
Preschool, aka Nursery School, is glorified child care. Nothing wrong with it, nothing wonderful about it either. Hanging out around the olde cabin is good too.
ACTA says in a press release today that only 24 schools out of 1,100 examined received its “A” grade. Their graduation requirements include at least six of seven subjects that are essential to a liberal arts education: literature, composition, economics, math, intermediate-level foreign language, science and American government/history.
Longstanding claims that stereotypes are inaccurate, in the face of an almost complete absence of data demonstrating inaccuracy. Indeed, stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most widely replicated effects in social psychology. One might think that a field plagued by a “replication crisis,” by tiny effect sizes, and by all sorts of threats to some of its most cherished conclusions would be singing to the world about one of the few large, robust, replicable findings in its vast literature. But if one keeps in mind the many ways in which political agendas influence and distort the field, one might not be surprised that many psychologists try to hush up, dismiss, or ignore such politically uncomfortable findings.
At HeterodoxAcademy, our contributors have documented the near absence of political diversity in many fields, and we have demonstrated the damaging effects that this homogeneity has on scholarship in those fields. We are not the first to do so. Scholars have been calling attention to this problem for decades… and nothing has been done.
This time will be different. We have come together to pool resources, analyze current trends in the academy, discuss possible solutions, and advocate for policies and systemic changes that will increase viewpoint diversity in the academy and therefore improve the quality of work that the academy makes available to the public, and to policymakers.
Their free-thought manifesto sounds like the Berkeley Free Speech movement.
Social science was — it is best to speak in the past tense — a mistake. The dream of a comprehensive science of society, which would elucidate “laws of history” or “social laws” comparable to the physical determinants or “laws” of nature, was one of the great delusions of the 19th century. Auguste Comte formulated a Religion of Humanity based on “the positive philosophy” or Positivism. Karl Marx went to his grave convinced that his discovery of laws of history had made him the Darwin or Newton of social science.
Positivism mercifully had little political influence, except in 19th-century Brazil, to which it contributed the national motto “Order and Progress.” In the 20th century Marxism split between a revisionist branch which became indistinguishable from welfare-state capitalism and communist totalitarianism, which survives in pure form today only in North Korea, and from the devastating effects of which Russia, China, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Vietnam and other countries are slowly recovering.
By the mid-20th century, the utopian fervor that had inspired earlier attempts at comprehensive sciences of society had burned out...
In the car, Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition. The lecture on Pascal is mind-blowing, a math and physics genius who invented the first binary "computer," who gave his life to Christ. Also, the lecture on Francis Bacon, where the prof reviews Bacon's False Idols of Knowledge and Science (from The New Organum (1620):
- The Idol of the Tribe: the arrogance that comes from agreement with one's colleagues - The Idol of the Cave: bias coming from one's psychology and background, and the vanity of attachment to an idea - The Idol of the Marketplace of Words: Wherein words take the place of real knowledge. - The Idol of Theater: Our received philosophical and scientific views as given by tradition and authority
It's better than college. Buy them on sale, and don't pay the library prices. Or trade with friends and neighbors, as we do.
You will thank me for this free ad for them. We are reviewing the big topics we have forgotten, or didn't have time to take in school. Things we need a guide for. Lifelong learning, like lifelong fitness, is a cliche but for good reason.
Humans love stories. "Mom, read me/tell me a story." Fiction is/was written for entertainment. Before movies, there was mostly music, theater and fiction. There are well-told stories and poorly-told. There are revelatory stories, life-contaminating stories, and everything in between. There are stories which vary in their demands on the reader.
One quote:
I once delivered a paper in Norway on Anna Karenina, and a prominent scholar replied: “All my career I have been telling students not to do what you have done, that is, treat characters as real people with real problems and real human psychology. Characters in a novel are nothing more than words on a page. It is primitive to treat fictional people as real, as primitive as the spectator who rushed on stage to save Jesus from crucifixion.” Here is the crux of it: Characters in a novel are neither words on a page nor real people. Characters in a novel are possible people. When we think of their ethical dilemmas, we do not need to imagine that such people actually exist, only that such people and such dilemmas could exist.
More reason to worry? Here are some higher ed students, and I wonder how they were ever accepted anywhere other than the need for warm butts to fill empty seats:
Glad my kids don't go here. It's unfortunate that this is in my home state of NJ. It's unfortunate this is the prevailing viewpoint at many universities. I am not aware of any notifications like this at Syracuse, or Miami (OH), where my boys are. However, I know this pattern of thinking is common at both schools.
I believe (or hope) it greatly overstates the matter. There are still plenty of serious, curious and highly-capable higher ed students out there, but they are diluted by the masses of people looking for a diploma only plus a few years of extended adolescence. Credentialists, partiers, and cheaters.
Furthermore, I believe that the academic fascism which seems so much in vogue right now has zero to do with genuine hypersensitivity. It is pure, calculated, activist bullying. Scalp-hunting. Why college admins tolerate it for one second is beyond me. They are supposed to be the strong adults in the room. In fact, by my era's standards, the students were supposed to be adults too.
Ten here, but there lots more. Just use your imagination.
Most can be learned in trade schools or ideally via apprenticeship: carpenter, cabinetmaker, gunsmith, programmer, video game inventor, professional lifeguard, medical marijuana dealer, hunting and fishing guide, writer, musician, gambler, office assistant, receptionist, illustrator, Uber driver, 16-wheeler truck driver, mechanic, train conductor, gardener, cook or chef, air traffic controller, retail manager or sales, landscape designer, entrepreneur of anything - the list is endless but you have to know how to do something useful.
As we’ve poured more and more government money into college “access,” schools have pocketed much of the money and gone on a spending spree – and then increased their tuition and fees, leading politicians to cry that they must increase student aid more to keep higher education “affordable.”
Private colleges have always practiced "holistic" admissions. It basically means that they take whoever they want for whatever reason. Nothing wrong with that, it seems to me. It's their school. High test scores definitely indicate academic potential, but other qualities and talents are interesting and valuable too. The elite schools look for a "flag" amongst all of their most highly qualified applicants. They can't take them all. Money is one of the flags but there are many others.
I have never been quite clear about what "studying" littacher means. (I do know the difference between aggressive reading and passive diversionary reading.) However, there are a few "critics" - I think of them as "illuminators", who are wonderful to read on the topics of books and authors. Books about books, which are literary works in themselves. Harold Bloom is one, another is John Updike, and I can list a few more who I enjoy like Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Walter Benjamin.
I also enjoy learning from experts about how stories (or songs or pictures or poems) are structured, the hidden architecture.
In the end, people do love well-told stories and well-depicted ideas and things, regardless of the medium. When stories, for example, are very well-written and constructed, the delight in the words adds a lot to the tale (eg rosy-fingered dawn). Craft, talent, inspiration, penetrating intelligence, wide knowledge, insight into human nature, magic - the things most of us lack but admire and even envy.
I would take a class with Bloom, but what about "studying littacher" in an ordinary high school or college? This via Schneiderman's Are Literature Departments Doomed? (but not his view):
Literary texts, like other artworks, are neither more nor less important than any other cultural artifact or practice. Keeping the emphasis on how cultural meanings are produced, circulated, and consumed, the investigator will focus on art or literature insofar as such works connect with broader social factors, not because they possess some intrinsic interest or special aesthetic values.
In Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton speak of “an implicit agreement between the university and students to demand little of each other.”
It's a conspiracy. For example, how many As did your kid get? Yeah, they all do.
