My question for those who make an economic defense of the liberal arts is always this: If the liberal arts cease to be financially rewarding, will you cease defending them?
Bruce Herman, “Meditation”
I’m going to spend some time with my first-years today discussing the skill of critical ignoring. First step: encouraging them to remember that any claim made without evidence can and should be dismissed without evidence.
At this stage of a campaign season, journalism consists largely of frantically shouting at people who would never in a million years vote for Candidate X that they shouldn’t vote for Candidate X.
There’s no major topic in American media that’s covered with less openness to new perspectives than education, no subject that’s more of a citadel for establishment narratives and business-as-usual. And none more obviously cries out for real rebel thinking; it’s a subject that’s considered of massive public importance, governed by a sclerotic and self-righteous conventional wisdom, where the “reform” agenda has produced decades of failure despite all of its no-excuses rhetoric. We spend extravagantly in this country, to no avail, and yet people still insist that it’s a funding problem. We institute endless school-side accountability programs, nothing gets better, and yet people still insist it’s an accountability problem. The whole education experience of the last 50 years proves that our issues cannot be solved at the school side, and yet no arguments to that effect are made in establishment media.
At Padre Island National Seashore you can drive on the beach — if you have a 4-wheel drive vehicle, you can do that for sixty miles, until you come to Mansfield Channel, which separates the North and South islands.
Via this post from Sara Hendren — AKA @ablerism — I see that I need to read Dougald Hine. One sentence from Hine’s book sums up so much that is essential: “The entitlements of late modernity are not compatible with the realities of life on a finite planet and they do not even make us happy.”
So here I am praising David Brooks for … thinking some of the things I think, I guess. But I can’t help it if he and I are both right!
The response by Gemma M. (whom I don’t know) at my most recent BMAC post is fascinating to me, and truly moving.
Mark 7:34. I should get points for biblical literacy instead of being rejected.
dozing
