The True Purpose of the University by Heather MacDonald

The True Purpose of the University by Heather MacDonald

A postmodern theorist, the prime product of today’s university culture, would immediately object that there is no such thing as neutral knowledge. But this hyper-sophisticated critique is irrelevant to the problem of widespread student ignorance. There exists a bedrock of core facts and ideas that precede any later revisionist interpretation. They would include, at a bare minimum: the events that led to the creation of the nation-state in Europe; the achievements of Greco-Roman civilization; familiarity with key works of Shakespeare, the Greek tragedians, Twain, Dickens, Wordsworth, and Swift, among others; an understanding of genetics and the functioning of neurons; and the philosophical basis for constitutional democracy, among hundreds of other essential strata of the human geology.

Imagine if universities actually taught knowledge and not victimhood!

You might not want to go to Heaven by Matt Walsh

You might not want to go to Heaven by Matt Walsh

That’s why, when our time comes and we stand before the throne of judgment, I imagine that God will only need to ask one question: “What do you want?” And we, for the first time, will be forced to answer honestly. I fear that a great many of us will have no choice but to look back at Him and say, “Myself, Lord. Only myself.” Yet I pray, and I have hope, that you and I will be able to answer, with gratitude and joy, “You, Lord. Only you.” And no matter what answer we give, God’s response will be the same: “So be it.”

Interesting reflection on what Heaven really is.

Americans Are Denying Their Kids an Aspect of Human Dignity by Tyler O'Neil

Americans Are Denying Their Kids an Aspect of Human Dignity by Tyler O'Neil

Work is not just a way to earn much-needed cash — it provides the dignity of self-sufficiency and the knowledge that you are adding value. An increasing number of college graduates do not know this dignity, and there is no reason children should be prevented from experiencing it. Would there be as many unemployed college grads and young adults if these people had learned how to make money as children?

Original re-thinking on child labor. 

Enabling Murder by Bruce Bawer

Enabling Murder by Bruce Bawer

Damn these jihadist murderers of children. And damn the politicians who have, in many cases, helped make these murders possible but who are quick, this time and every time, to serve up empty declarations of “solidarity”even as the bodies of innocents are still being counted.

He pulls no punches. I love that!

Crushing on Crushers by Theodore Dalrymple

Crushing on Crushers by Theodore Dalrymple

Though Hollander does not claim that there is a single explanation for intellectuals’ attraction to dictatorships such as those of Stalin, Mao, and Castro (or Khomeini, in the case of Foucault), let alone to have found it, he nevertheless believes, in my view plausibly, that the longing for quasi-religious belief in an age when actual religion has largely been rejected is a significant part of the explanation. 

One of my favorite thinkers on an important topic.

Can Studying Grammar Save Our Culture? by Thaddeus Kozinski

Can Studying Grammar Save Our Culture? by Thaddeus Kozinski

We have heard much about the moral, political, and spiritual corruption of American culture, and certainly there is tremendous need for conscious and vigorous action to shape and reshape our behavior in accordance with virtue, the common good, and God’s Law. What could studying grammar have to do with saving our culture? Well, we are told in John’s Gospel that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Does this passage indicate an intimate connection between language and God, and thus between our words and our spiritual health? As Orwell argued at the end of World War II, the ubiquitous corruption of language in the West was not simply an effect of moral and political corruption, but was, in a profound sense, a cause of it.

Language is essential to what we are as human beings. As our language becomes corrupted, understanding becomes impossible. We are returning to Babel.

What Classical Education Is Not by Jeremy Wagner

What Classical Education Is Not by Jeremy Wagner

I have presented this unlikely scenario in order to show what classical education is not. It is not a system. It is not a theory or a collection of practices, such as one adheres to stubbornly for its own sake, or else tries out for a while and later discards in favor of something more beneficial. Classical education is what is beneficial. Or rather classical education is the tradition of learning what is beneficial and cultivating it. For what is truly beneficial will always be that which is in harmony with the nature of things, with reality. It is this conviction that sets the classical tradition apart from the narrow ideologies and fads of every age.  

It's always good to challenge our assumptions to see if we are still on the right path.

Democracy Is Not Your Plaything by Peggy Noonan

Democracy Is Not Your Plaything by Peggy Noonan

It would be good if top Hill Republicans went en masse to the president and said: “Stop it. Clean up your act. Shut your mouth. Do your job. Stop tweeting. Stop seething. Stop wasting time. You lost the thread and don’t even know what you were elected to do anymore. Get a grip. Grow up and look at the terrain, see it for what it is. We have limited time. Every day you undercut yourself, you undercut us. More important, you keep from happening the good policy things we could have done together. If you don’t grow up fast, you’ll wind up abandoned and alone. Act like a president or leave the presidency.”

Peggy Noonan is one of the clearest thinkers we have. She is so able to cut through the chaos and see the forest for the trees. 

Not to Irksome Toil, But to Delight by Aaron Ames

Not to Irksome Toil, But to Delight by Aaron Ames

The result is an over-worked, over-stressed, perpetually distracted, lonely, depressed, desperate culture. We have exchanged play and community for the principles of utility and individualism. Whatever is useful and productive, whatever helps each of us achieve independence, these are the driving forces of our society. And, yet, the most peculiar outcome of a society built on such ideals is that we are at once, always at work, always productive, and, yet, likewise, always wasting time, always seeking the next diversion. We are simultaneously exhausted and bored, productive and unproductive. 

Anything on the Circe blog just makes me happy.

Why Milo Scares Students, and Faculty Even More by Rachel Fulton Brown

Why Milo Scares Students, and Faculty Even More by Rachel Fulton Brown

This, I would argue, is why American college students and faculty find Milo’s talks so threatening. The issues that Milo talks about are usually considered political, but in fact have to do with people's deepest convictions: the proper relations between women and men, the definition of community, the role of beauty, access to truth. Milo professes himself a Catholic and wears a pair of gold crosses around his neck. He speaks about the importance of Christianity for the values of Western civilization. As he put it in one interview: “[Western civilization] has created a religion in which love and self-sacrifice and giving are the highest possible virtues… That's a good thing… But when you remove discipline and sacrifice from religion you get a cult.”

We are discovering that when you proscribe religion from the public square, you don't get no religion, you get dangerous religion.

Deliver Us from iPads by Heather Wilhelm

Deliver Us from iPads by Heather Wilhelm

This all leads up to my opinion, which is wild and controversial and might make many people slightly huffy and maybe even hopping mad: With a very small list of exceptions, your child should not have an iPad or an iPhone or an iAnything at dinner.

Can you imagine?!? Bored kids being forced to behave and entertain themselves? The horror!

The Left’s War on Free Speech by Kimberly Strassel

The Left’s War on Free Speech by Kimberly Strassel

In the weeks following the Citizens United ruling, the Left settled on a new strategy. If it could no longer use speech laws against its opponents,  it would do the next best thing—it would threaten, harass, and intimidate its opponents out of participation. It would send a message: conservatives choosing to exercise their constitutional rights will pay a political and personal price.

Kimberly Strassel is good, and she has the research to back her up!

Today’s Futurists Resort To Ancient Paganism To Explain Away Christianity by Michael Morris

Today’s Futurists Resort To Ancient Paganism To Explain Away Christianity by Michael Morris

This is not difficult for anyone who has even a basic understanding of theology to see, but as University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown writes, “If you drive out explicit theology from public education, you get not no theology, but only bad theology, theology never properly examined as such. It is a mistake not to teach religion as religion.” With this shift of science as the choice religion for the theologically uneducated comes a unique opportunity to witness firsthand the development of myth.

Plus he quotes C.S. Lewis, so there's that.

How Google Took Over the Classroom by Natasha Singer

How Google Took Over the Classroom by Natasha Singer

The director of Google’s education apps group, Jonathan Rochelle, touched on that idea in a speech at an industry conference last year. Referring to his own children, he said: “I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it.” He added, “And I don’t know why they can’t ask Google for the answer if the answer is right there.”

This is a long article about Google's push to dominate in education. But the most interesting part to me was the unspoken assumption that technology in the classroom is only positive. The only concern was privacy issues. As the quote above shows, the affect it has on actual learning is not a consideration. "Googling" something rewards those who know what questions to ask. For the uninformed, it can be a time-sucking morass. 

Even Prominent Conservatives Have Socialism Hiding Inside Their Heads by Robert Tracinski

Even Prominent Conservatives Have Socialism Hiding Inside Their Heads by Robert Tracinski

What started out as a moderate call for common ground on this issue turns into a complete capitulation to the principles and outlook of the Left. The assumption here is that “society,” not the individual, is the ultimate standard of moral value. The interests of society are supreme and everything the individual has—including the products of a lifetime of effort, and all the hopes you have for your children—can be sacrificed to it.

Interesting, original take on how pervasive left-wing assumptions have become.

How a Polymath Mastered Math—and So Can You by James Taranto

How a Polymath Mastered Math—and So Can You by James Taranto

By trial and error, Ms. Oakley had learned how to learn: “The higher I went, it started to gradually make more and more sense.” Her language experience proved valuable. “The way you learn intensively for a language is very similar to learning well in math and science,” she says. But that isn’t the predominant view among American educators. “In learning math and science through K-12, it’s long been held that practice and repetition will kill your creativity,” she says. “One mistake we make in the school system is we emphasize understanding. But if you don’t build those neural circuits with practice, it’ll all slip away. You can understand out the wazoo, but it’ll just disappear if you’re not practicing with it.”

Wow! She nails it! And her only qualification is that she has taught herself how to learn. Why don't professional educators know this?

What Ever Happened to the Civil Rights Movement? by Myron Magnet

What Ever Happened to the Civil Rights Movement? by Myron Magnet

But like many admirable movements, even this one had its excesses. Equality of opportunity wasn’t enough, some insisted. We needed equality of results. Government and private institutions adopted numerical goals and quotas and tried to reach them through affirmative action—that is, through a supposedly beneficent discrimination by race, seemingly legal, since the Supreme Court, even in Brown v. Board of Education, had never repudiated Plessy v. Ferguson’s odious 1896 acceptance of racial discrimination. We got forced school busing to make student populations of each school mirror the racial composition of the region, and public education’s focus shifted from imparting knowledge to fighting racial disparity—or, as the progressive-ed schools put it, advancing social justice. Needless to say, the education of black kids improved not a whit.

Long, but so well written and thought through.

Classical Education for Modern Times By Dr. Terrence Moore

Classical Education for Modern Times By Dr. Terrence Moore

Rather, the classical view understands that a human being without knowledge of the world, without an understanding of civilization, and without a judgment formed by the standards of true greatness, is much like a man with amnesia. He does not know who he is or where he comes from. He does not know his rights or his duties. He knows neither his debts nor his debtors. Worse, he may easily become the pawn of the first huckster he runs into, so unfamiliar and strange will his surroundings seem to him.

Great synopsis of Classical Education.

The Crown Must Always Win: A Conversation by Joshua Gibbs

The Crown Must Always Win: A Conversation by Joshua Gibbs 

We are incredulous of the idea that little things matter, though Tommy knows that he who is faithful in little will be faithful in much. We cannot tell ourselves, “I will break all the little daily rules, but keep the big yearly rules.” No. If we break the little daily rules, we will simply get good at breaking the rules and getting away with it. When the time comes to keep the big rules, we will have practiced escaping justice and see little value in being honest.

A great conversation about a great show and the need to honor the past before we set about to potentially tear it down.

What Trump Gets Right—and Progressives Get Wrong—About Andrew Jackson by Andrew Exum

What Trump Gets Right—and Progressives Get Wrong—About Andrew Jackson by Andrew Exum

This is why Trump is not wholly wrong, albeit in his rambling way, when he speaks of Jackson saving the Union—not during the Civil War, of course, but three decades earlier. That was no small achievement. It was, indeed, the ultimateachievement of the founding fathers and the generation that followed them. Contemporary progressives, however, apparently see little to celebrate in such achievements. And if Jackson has fallen out of popular favor among the elites, well, the University of Virginia among others should be growing uneasy, because it’s only a matter of time before Jefferson, Madison, and many others also fall from grace.

Self-awareness just makes me happy.

The Know-Nothing Campus ‘Protest’ Movement by John McWhorter

The Know-Nothing Campus ‘Protest’ Movement by John McWhorter

And the problem is that any attempt to find coherence in this behavior fails, unless we understand that the entire business is a performance—gesture in the guise of action. We object to these people with logic in vain, missing that they are less protesting than “protesting.”

I don't agree with John McWhorter on everything, but he IS an original thinker and a brilliant analyst.