The Necessity Of Bravery In Scholarship

Roger Scruton was a brave man. He was personally brave and intellectually brave. His personal bravery is evident from his activities in Eastern Europe helping to forge underground universities in the 1980s. There were real personal risks in doing that. Police states do not look kindly on anyone who encourages intellectual opposition to them. But then neither did Scruton’s academic colleagues back in the United Kingdom. There, he was persona non grata in an institutional world dominated by leftists and socialists always eager to excuse despotism and authoritarianism. That, after all, was their road to power.

While his academic brethren indulged ever more fantastical theories of society and human nature, Scruton found himself at odds with his generation. As he observed somewhat ruefully in his autobiography, he had some regrets about this. A mild touch of melancholy offset his phlegmatic personality. The generation who got their PhDs in or after the mid-1960s were serially attracted to successive forms of soft totalitarian faculty-lounge rhetoric: Marxist, Nietzschean, postmodernist, and identitarian. Each of these currents worshiped power. Scruton didn’t. Nor was he intimidated by it. He didn’t bend to fashions, crowds or collective passions.

No small part of the reason that the English intelligentsia (on the whole) despised him was that he possessed a remarkable independence of mind which they conspicuously lacked. That independence of mind was obvious when Scruton published The Meaning of Conservatism in 1980. He was aged 36. A defence of conservatism was practically inconceivable then—and it remains in academic circles today a rare thing. Especially a defence undertaken with Scruton’s depth of thought.

Like all classic writers Scruton existed at a slight tangent to time. He entered the public intellectual fray with a book that was out of step with “the times”. He remained that way, steadfastly but always interestingly. He did not wait for Communism to fall to oppose Communism. He argued for the virtues of England long before Brexit. He defended the imagination against social fantasy, beauty against the despotic rage for reason, and a placid, gentle politics against angry political posturing.

Scruton’s work and life, voluminous and multifaceted as both were, displayed a number of fixed points, anchors amidst the flow of time. His intellect and soul were constantly and often maliciously attacked by his critics. He paid a personal price for all the nasty badgering, manias and melodramas that were the calling-cards of the post-modern intellectual generation. Nevertheless his persistence resulted in a venerable body of work which had at its heart an intimation of a beatific faith. This was not just faith in a transcendent personal God but also the kind of faith that manifests itself in decent societies, genial associations, firm friends and responsible individuals.

Scruton was a careful thinker. He was trained in analytic philosophy at Cambridge. Elizabeth Anscombe, a student of Wittgenstein, was his PhD supervisor. That training left a mark on his philosophical style—a care in drawing distinctions. Sometimes he overdid that. But after his Cambridge student years (1963-1973) he discovered another intellectual tradition. Philosophically it was the tradition of Edmund Burke, the Whig inspirer of English conservatives. But, in the case of Scruton, Burke represented not just a philosophical archetype. After all Scruton was deeply familiar with Hegel, Kant and Spinoza—and the rest of the Western tradition of philosophy. No, the Burkean aspect was more than philosophical. It connected Scruton with a tradition of English letters that favoured straightforward, elegant expression and a style of writing about society and politics that was beautiful.

Among his many works, this literary style reached a dazzling peak in England: An Elegy, Scruton’s unparalleled description of the nature of England and the English. Most of his critics favoured language that was obscurantist and tortured—the more unintelligible the better. They all aspired to be public intellectuals because they wanted their fantasies to rule the world. Yet unlike most of them, Scruton was a genuine public intellectual—a person who could speak and write clearly and movingly about matters of great human importance.

Because Scruton didn’t worship power, the political party that he was close to, Britain’s Conservative Party, casually turned on him in 2019. In the last year of life, an infantile trophy-hunting left-wing journalist publicised a series of doctored quotes from an interview with him. He briefly lost his unpaid appointment to a government commission on good architecture, a topic he loved. He was restored to the post after the journalist’s fraud was revealed. But the action to dismiss him showed something striking. Namely how weak those who hold power can be, and how prone they are to panicked judgements. Small-c conservative qualities of faith, reliability, durability, commitment, and piety mattered to Scruton. Woven deeply into his writings are themes of promises, commitments, and vows; and things imperishable, immortal, and transcendent. His life encapsulated those values. He lived the way he thought.

Peter Murphy is a professor at La Trobe University and at the Cairns Institute, James Cook University.

The image shows, “Watson and the Shark,” by John Singleton Copley, painted in 1778.

Educational U-Turn

According to recent economic data, the gap between the rich and the low-income people is bigger than ever before, and the level of inequality between Blacks and Whites is highest since 1989: “Whites have $13 for $1 held by African Americans” (The Washington Post on Dec. 3rd, 2014). The tone of the pronouncements is alarming, and, the claim goes, unless something is done, the wealth divide may become the cause of social unrest.

What goes unnoticed in the context of endless discussions concerning the growing income inequality is the galloping educational inequality where the blame cannot be assigned to the rich for the educational ills of the poor. In the economic realm one can tax the rich to transfer wealth to the poor, but one cannot transfer knowledge, that is, linguistic comprehension and social and scientific competence, of those who are highly literate to improve the comprehension of low-income children.

The last two hundred “democratic” years, which witnessed the spread of public libraries and learning institutions created for the use of ordinary citizens, abounds in examples of children from poor and modest backgrounds getting to the top of Western societies.

Twentieth-century — both in the democratic West and in the former Communist countries — demonstrates that one can elevate the uneducated masses to a historically unprecedented level of literacy and scientific competence. The key to success was teaching proper language – the language of educated classes (or elites – the word purged from American English) so that the masses of ordinary people could participate in High Culture and civic and scientific life of the country.

What we observe in Twenty-First-century America is an educational U-turn. We graduate masses of elementary, high-school and college students who are below the level of reading daily newspapers. Their comprehension is getting worse and worse each year, and the average present-day public-school student does not have enough vocabulary to read the same books that his counterpart did a decade let alone two decades ago.

We produce citizens who have no linguistic and thus conceptual skills to grasp the complex political, social, and economic problems that every nation faces in its history. The question is why? And if you think it is lack of resources or bad teachers, you are likely to be wrong.

Despite the recurrent media “witch-hunt” after bad teachers, teachers bear much less responsibility than one would like to assign to them. They are victims of cultural and institutional politics that pushed out the traditional methods of teaching and learning and replaced them by pedagogy, children’s psychology and, in the last decade, electronic insanity which makes children scroll through a text rather than read.

The last thing one sees is young people reading and what they read, if they read books at all, are books that bear semblance to literature, but they are not. They lack literary imagination characteristic of the Classics, the characters are psychologically flat, rarely animated by any virtues, and speak the language of the people from the street. Instead of making our children’s English better, more elegant, we perpetuate bad habits and cater to their existing vocabulary level, leaving them behind their richer counterparts.

If one wonders why foreign students, Asian, and many from former British colonies in Africa, are so successful in America, the answer is: they came from societies where educational habits did not change much for decades. Their parents brought with them traditional study skills and discipline – the two things which are absent here. Memorization and endless drills “till you get it right” are essential tools for getting high grades.

To some extent the same attitude still prevails in good private and most Catholic schools in the U.S. There vocabulary is still taught from serious vocabulary books in the old-fashioned way by memorization, drills, endless and relentless repetition and exercises. In some of those schools, students take Latin, French, sometimes German, which for an English speaker is the only way to learn grammar (since grammar is never taught).

As a nation, we need to realize that the wealth divide between “haves” and “have-nots” corresponds to “comprehends” and “comprehend-nots.” One cannot teach, for example, eighth grade science or history to students who operate on the fifth or sixth grade vocabulary level. If one’s comprehension is not up to the level of being accepted by a good college, one’s chances for social and financial advancement disappears from before one’s child’s eyes.

The educational abyss overlaps to a large extent with the financial abyss making America look like a “tale of two cities”: fewer and fewer well-educated rich and growing masses of semi-literate and helpless low-income people.

Unlike the acquisition of wealth which requires personal and rare qualities (industriousness, self-determination, etc.), all it takes to know one’s language well is reading good literature. Reading is what disappeared from American households and schools.

Few children from the poor backgrounds have heard of Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Mark Twain, Hans Christian Anderson, the Brothers Grimm, Homer, Aesop, let alone Plutarch’s lives of great Greeks and Romans — the authors who formed the imagination and language of generations of readers in the Western world. Using a dictionary and reading Classics appears to belong to the remote past and is restricted to a relatively small group of richer children which makes them look like educational aristocracy.

Why do our youngsters not read the Classics? There are two answers to this question: Parents and younger teachers themselves did not read them, and the teachers succumbed to the ridiculous idea propagated by so-called “experts” in pedagogy that children understand literature best when they “can relate to” characters whose problems and language are theirs.

If so, how on earth can one explain how millions of girls of several generations ago could relate to Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Princess and the Pea” without sleeping on a pile of pillows, or Snow White? The answer is, we relate through imagination which is a vehicle to a more beautiful world and a way of getting out from the ugliness of our own environment and poverty.

No literary character is real. Literary characters are merely plausible, and literature is a promise that we can imagine being elsewhere in life. To illustrate my point, let me invoke an example of a poor Hispanic Brooklyn girl who became America’s Supreme Court Justice – Sonya Sotomayor. This is what she said in the January 13, 2014, NPR Fresh Air interview:

“One day talking to my first-year roommate … I was telling her about how out of place I felt at Princeton, how I didn’t connect with many of the experiences that some of my classmates were describing, and she said to me, “You’re like Alice in Wonderland.”

I said, “Who is Alice?”

And she said, “You don’t know about Alice?”
I said, “No, I don’t.”

And she said, “It’s one of the greatest book classics in English literature. You should read it.”

“I recognized at that moment that there were likely to be many other children’s classics that I had not read. … Before I went home that summer, I asked her to give me a list of some of the books she thought were children’s classics and she gave me a long list and I spent the summer reading them. That was perhaps the starkest moment of my understanding that there was a world I had missed, of things that I didn’t know anything about.”

Justice Sotomayor’s words should be a cautionary tale for all present-day educators who by experimenting with new methods are in fact closing the door to the future before our children’s eyes.

How did we reach such low level of literacy? There are several reasons, of which the first one is the idea of multiculturalism propagated in the 1980s and 90s. According to it, a multicultural society should, or even must, represent minorities in educational curriculum.

This argument is similar in nature to the one I presented above: it is based on the false intellectual and moral premise that the work of art does not have an intrinsic value; its value lies in the fact that it was created by a member of a given minority, and the minority reader (or viewer of a painting or sculpture) is more likely to appreciate it if he is of the same sex, race, ethnicity.

But to make such a claim is tantamount to saying that there are no objective criteria of judgement. The criteria are subjective and determined by race or sex or ethnicity.

Secondly, multiculturalism is inimical to the idea of a nation. Americans may not be a nation in the same sense in which other nations are, and whose literature captures peculiar moments of a historical development, mentality and the features of its people.

It is unimaginable to be a German without knowing Goethe, Schiller, or Heine; French without knowing Racine, Corneille, or Moliere, Pascal and Descartes; Russian without knowing Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Lermontov, or Gogol and Pasternak. They are not just great writers; they are national monuments, of which Germans, French, and Russians are proud.

To be sure, America does not have national literature in the same sense. Knowing Thoreau or Emerson, Steinbeck or Faulkner, or C.S. Lewis does not make an American American. What does is the tacit intellectual commitment – inculcated in the educational process — to principles on which this country was founded, and which for a century or so was transmitted through what Americans used to call “Great Books.”

There are no American writers in it. What the American “Library of Alexandria” contains are the greatest treasures of European intellectual tradition which goes back to the Greeks, Romans, great Christian writers, such as, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Calvin, Luther, and others. But first of all, much of what one finds in this library is British or English, including the greatest works in the English language: the language of America and the language of its legal and political tradition.

As things stand, America appears to be in the final stage of repudiating its threefold past: British, Protestant and Western. Multiculturalism is not merely a failed promise of a providing a better education; it is a moral and intellectual disease, and that is how we should treat it. We need to repudiate it loudly by returning to our old “Library of Alexandria.”

Pouring more money into education will not solve the problem and will more likely make things worse. The money will be spent on organizing conferences on new methods of teaching, relating to students, buying new computers – all that is taking students away from reading. It is time to recognize the simple truth that there are no new methods in education but one: old-fashioned painstaking acquisition of vocabulary, learning grammar and reading good books.

It may not always be true that every rich person is educated but the majority of children from richer families or families where reading is a daily bread are the same who will graduate from top universities. They will acquire wealth while the semi-literate will remain financially poor because they will not be able to master subjects necessary to get jobs to get out of poverty and advance their social status.

There is also a place for the billionaires and richer members of our society to help the poor, not by squandering money on educational foundations, but by directly engaging in doing something: sponsoring children Classics book-clubs, giving incentives to children who read a lot, organizing serious foreign language classes where they could learn language and grammar.

Perhaps McDonalds and other food chains, which live off the low-income people, could promote Classics by putting books, like Starbucks does selling CDs with music, at the counter offering “voracious readers” awards, or giving a free meal to children who read X number of books. Education does not have to cost a lot, provided one knows what it is, but social costs of having millions of poorly educated citizens can and we should do something about it.

If we are serious about improving education, we need to go back to basics: a pencil, a sheet of paper, a dictionary, basic Latin and Greek, and classic literature with a teacher who should not be bothered by a continuous nonsense of improving methods of teaching. No method is a substitute for literary competence and imagination.

Zbigniew Janowski is the author of Cartesian Theodicy: Descartes’ Quest for Certitude, Index Augustino-Cartesian, Agamemnon’s Tomb: Polish Oresteia (with Catherine O’Neil), How To Read Descartes’ Meditations. He also is the editor of Leszek Kolakowski’s My Correct Views on Everything, The Two Eyes of Spinoza and Other Essays on Philosophers, John Stuart Mill: On Democracy, Freedom and Government & Other Selected Writings. He is currently working on a collection of articles: Homo Americanus: Rise of Democratic Totalitarianism in America.

The image shows, “Woman Reading. Portrait of Sofia Kramskaya,” by Ivan Kramskoi, and painted sometime after 1866.

A Modest Proposal To Rescue Higher Education

There are three issues that reflect crisis in higher education: Rising costs leading to serious student debt; lack of competence of graduates in basic skills; politicization.

Costs of Higher Education

The cost of obtaining a degree has risen at an astronomical rate, compared to the overall rate of inflation. Part of the reason is that when someone else is paying (government-guaranteed loans) we cannot resist the temptation to raise prices and to overspend.

This over-spending is reflected in the fact that academic bureaucracies and support staff have swelled. They have swelled because the increase in people seeking degrees leads to a vast increase in the number of students either incapable of, or unprepared for, college-level work. Lack of preparation reflects the disaster of K-12 schooling.

Culturally, we have not honestly discussed students’ limited ability and disinterest. A large part of the educational establishment sustains the myth that it has a utopian social technology for solving all social problems.

In addition, the higher-education industry refuses to give up market share and prefers to adulterate (dumb-down) the product, as well as pursue its private political agenda, as opposed to its academic mission. It is much more exhilarating to think that you are transforming the world than to admit that you are part of a gigantic fraud.

We continue to camouflage these difficulties by doing away with the evidence – doing away with tests or other forms of objective assessment and by engaging in semantics. Faculty, who are rightly fearful of finding themselves redundant or expendable, are complicit.

Competence

Lack of competence reflects the dumbing-down of standards and achievement. The very failure of post-secondary education leads to the claim that students need more education in the form of advanced degrees – which, by the way, increases market share. The major problem here is that we have not distinguished between higher education and longer education.

Higher education, as reflected in serious requirements in multiple disciplines (what the old liberal arts degree used to reflect, like mathematics, science, history, philosophy, foreign languages, the ability to read and write critically, to do research and scholarship, etc.), is only achievable by about 20% of the school-age population – again a difficult statistic for a democratic culture to accept.

Longer education, on the other hand, is achievable by about a further 60% of the school-age population. This is what the vast majority of students really need to function in an increasingly complex economic world.

If we focused resources on this cohort, then we would produce competent graduates relevant to the workforce. The academic establishment would cry that these graduates have not been taught liberal subjects – ignoring the fact that most students are neither interested in, nor capable of, understanding these subjects or critical thinking.

It is also not clear to me that a liberal arts education makes you a better human being or a better citizen. As a result, most students do not learn what they can and should learn. Finally, the liberal arts have by now been totally politicized. For example, instead of reading Shakespeare to learn something about the human predicament, students now are led to discover that the author was racist, sexist, homophobic, and so forth.

Politicization

There is a hidden political agenda. Since the 18th-century, the intellectual world has been dominated by the ideology of the Enlightenment Project – the view, based on the false assumption that the so-called “social sciences” are like the physical sciences; that there are experts (university professors) who know the fundamental truths; such that they have a social technology which enables them to solve every social problem; and thus they should be in charge of an institution (namely, the government) with the power to implement this technology over every other social institution. In addition to being empty abstractions, mission statements are thinly veiled political agendas.

It should come as no surprise that such intellectuals favor central control and that they seek to silence dissent (including, and especially, other professors who deny the existence of these truths or this technology). If the experts were to disagree, then we would not know who, if any, are the real experts. John Stuart Mill must be turning in his grave.

These ideologues educate the K-12 faculty, the journalists and even the clergy; they dominate the publishing and media world. They offer academic positions to politicians or their spouses – the academic-political complex; they fund propaganda centers; they control who is invited to be a commencement speaker.

Given the foregoing, it should come as no surprise that the political agenda of universities is to indoctrinate students into becoming democratic socialists, i.e., to vote for the left-wing of the Democratic Party. All of this costs money and necessitates a big endowment devoted, not to education or to tuition remission – but to a political agenda.

Given these problems, I therefore propose the following remedies.

Economic

All universities should lose their tax-exempt status. They should charge a market-determined price for their services: if degrees are so valuable monetarily with regard to future income then universities should contract with students to pay no tuition (i.e., everybody goes to college for ‘free’) but students would agree to pay a modest percentage of all future earnings. Who would turn down such a great win-win offer? Presumably, some universities could focus on under-prepared students.

Universities cannot contend that they are preserving a cultural and intellectual heritage – in fact, they are trashing it. The heritage is being preserved in many other institutions and should never be the exclusive prerogative of one type of institution. Serious research in all fields is now being done primarily in think-tanks and private laboratories.

All universities should be required to contribute ¾ of their present endowment to defray the costs of student loans by present graduates of their respective schools. In many cases, universities are circumventing donor intent. The endowment is now used to pay huge salaries to administrators and consultants, and as well to turn campuses into country-clubs. Universities have engaged in false advertising by accepting students knowing that many of them will not succeed (e.g., retention rates).

Universities should be encouraged to define themselves and their own requirements – how many years, what courses. We need innovation and experimentation. We need boutique education.

There will no longer be any need for accreditation. Accreditation agencies promote uniformity not competition; they are a disguise for the imposition of the political agenda; they are so inherently corrupt (academic insiders evaluating other academic insiders) that Enron’s accounting/auditing scandal pales by comparison.

Competence

Academics favor government regulation, so why not regulate them as well?
All graduates should be required to take a competency exam consisting of four parts:

  • Basic communication skills (write a coherent paragraph)
  • Math skills
  • Technology skills (e.g. computer) [Standards to be set by the Department of Education in consultation with representatives from the top five technology companies, as determined by market value]
  • Knowledge of major public policy debates (see next section on politicization)

Those who pass the exam would be given a certification (like passing the bar exam in law or board exams in medicine). These certifications will be made public so that employers may use them in judging applicants for a position. Perhaps U.S. News and World Report could use these statistics. This is certainly more reliable than the popularity polls they use now.

If the graduate fails the exam three times, the degree must be rescinded; but the student may take the exam as many times as he/she wished. Those who fail the exam five consecutive times should be allowed to participate in a CLASS-ACTION SUIT AGAINST THEIR UNIVERSITY.

The Department of Education should evaluate schools on their certification passage rates. These ratings would be made public; below a certain passage rate would lead to the revocation of their license and eventual closure of the school.

The Department of Education is not going to disappear – every time democratic socialists are elected, they will bring it back. Every regulatory agency runs the risk of politicization. My suggestion brings it out in the open and minimizes it.

Politicization

The examinations on religion, politics, or other disputed topics, should not turn on the truth or falsehood of opinions, but on the matter of fact that such and such an opinion is held, on such and such grounds, by such and such authors, or schools, or churches. All positions would be studied.
The selection of disputed topics and the acceptable answers would be publicly posted in advance.

The Department of Education would form a special committee, both to formulate the questions and what constitutes an acceptable answer (especially the reasons or arguments for a position). The use of fallacious reasoning (e.g., ad hominem arguments) would result in disqualification.

The membership of the committee would be determined as follows: every political party that polls at least 5% of the national vote will designate their participant(s); and the number of each group’s designees will be proportional to the last presidential election. Terms will be staggered.

The Q&A will be formulated by those who advocate the position. No test is perfect but it is better than no test. Current university students have no idea that there is an alternative position on anything. The point is not to require agreement but merely require knowledge of what is being argued, by whom, and how.

Nicholas Capaldi is Legendre-Soulé Distinguished Chair in Business Ethics at Loyola University New Orleans, where he also serves as Director of the Center for Spiritual Capital. He is the founder and President of the Global Corporate Governance Institute. He received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD from Columbia University. His principal research and teaching interest is in public policy and its intersection with political science, philosophy, law, religion, and economics. He is the author of 8 books, over 100 articles, editor of ten anthologies, member of the editorial board of six journals, and has served as editor of Public Affairs Quarterly. He is Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of Corporate Social Responsibility (Springer). His most recent books are Liberty and Equality in Political Economy: From Locke versus Rousseau to the Present, as well as The Anglo-American Conception of the Rule of Law. He is also the author of the Cambridge intellectual biography, John Stuart Mill.

The image shows, “The School,” by Jan Steen, painted in 1660.

 Indigenous Ways of Knowing?

Once again, the brilliant minds at University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, better known as OISE, has graced the world with another one of their hair-brained theories. It’s called Indigenous Ways of Knowing and it’s coming to schools near you.

OISE is rallying teachers to poison our children with these ludicrously pre– non-historical ways of thought.

CLICK HERE to be forwarded to the module on OISE’s website designed to educate teachers on what is and how to teach Indigenous Ways of Knowing.

What exactly is Indigenous Ways of Knowing? Well, buckle up because for anybody with half a brain it’s going to be a bumpy ride as we dive into the seven topics of this half-witted module.

 

TOPIC ONE “What is Indigenous Knowledge?”

So, what exactly is Indigenous Knowledge? Your guess seems to be as good as anybody else’s. Our mis-informed friends at OISE don’t even define what they’re talking about. Like many of the buzzwords taught at our universities, they’re about triggering certain emotions as opposed to thoughts.

To quote the module, “In this module, Indigenous knowledge is described rather than defined. There are sources and characteristics that are shared among diverse Indigenous peoples but a hesitance to define it in one limiting way.”

No worries, let’s just cut them some slack and carry on with the module. But wait! What is the reason they give for not being able to describe what they are talking about? Oh right…. it’s because of those rotten Westerners….

According to the module, “Indigenous knowledge definitions can be problematic because they often use the dominant knowledge system (Western knowledge) as a frame of reference.”

See what I mean about triggering emotions instead of thoughts? They even blame the West for not being able to articulate their own thoughts. Is Western guilt hitting rock bottom? Or is it as the Irish say, “if you think you’ve hit rock bottom, wait a while and you’ll hear a knock from bellow.”

Then, they quote Dr. Marie Battiste‘s description of  Indigenous knowledge. She claims that “Indigenous knowledge compromises the complex set of technologies developed and sustained by Indigenous civilizations. Often oral and symbolic, it is transmitted through the structure of Indigenous languages and passes on to the next generation through modeling, practice, and animation, rather than through written word.”

The module then states “Indigenous knowledge is embedded in community practices, rituals, and relationships. As a living knowledge, it is holistic, contextual, and relational.”

In other words, Indigenous knowledge is comprised of stone aged tools, pre-historic oral traditions, and rituals.

 

TOPIC TWO “Characteristics of Indigenous Knowing”

Finally, it’s time to dive into the descriptions given about the characteristics of Indigenous knowing. The characteristics of indigenous knowing are that it is “personal, orally transmitted, experiential, holistic, and narrative.”

What do these folks mean when they say that Indigenous knowledge is personal?

They mean “no one person has the truth… With multiple perceptions at the core, indigenous knowledge actualizes itself in context….thus indigenous knowledge is highly dynamic.”

Translation: more of that Post-modern garbage juice which claims that there is no real truth and that “everything’s, like, your, like, opinion man.”

If there’s no “real” truth, and everybody knows just as much as everybody else, then why are we paying you to teach us this garbage? If the students know as much as the teacher, why should they show up to class (or take the time to study this absurd module)?

What do these folks mean when they say that Indigenous Ways of Knowing is orally transmitted?

To quote the module, “Oral tradition is not a precursor to literate traditions. They are simply different ways of knowledge keeping.”

I think that they might have put the wrong herb in the peace pipe on this one. Oral tradition is not a precursor to literate tradition? What are they talking about?!

Do they even know what history, the study of written records, means? Or what pre-historic societies are? Do they not understand that people spoke to each other before they invented script and started to write things down?

I feel obliged to remind you that these people are the teachers of your children’s teachers!

What do these folks mean when they say that “Indigenous Ways of Knowing” are experiential?

Well, the module claims, “The land is alive, the only way to know that is to be on the land. The senses can know more deeply and concretely than knowledge gained though reading or being told.”

I’m not going to lie, there is some truth in that claim. One only has to read a bit of Walt Whitman to sympathize with this position. But that being said, I severely question how deeply one can understand a blade of grass just by holding it, as opposed to learning about it in a botany text book. Furthermore, it is very questionable that holding it, seeing, and tasting it provides a “deeper” understanding.

What do these folks mean when they say that “Indigenous Ways of Knowing” are holistic?

The module defines Indigenous knowledge as holistic because it “brings together internal and external worlds, the physical and the spiritual.”

Hold up….

Last time I checked, The Canadian Public School Board was a secular board. Then why are we telling teachers to introduce Native Spirituality into the classroom? Isn’t the entire idea of secularism the right to be free of religious rule and religious teaching?

Is telling teachers to teach Native Spirituality fair to other spiritual denominations?

For example, The Orthodox Church of America claims to be holistic. Orthodox also believe their teachings are universal and unite the external and internal parts of ourselves. As strict monists, they believe in the existence of only one world (that the natural and supernatural are united as one in the same world).

Ironically, the OCA also has a disproportionately high number of aboriginals, particularly the Alaskan Kodiak naitives, in the hierarchy of their church.

Should teachers be allowed, or rather encouraged, to bring in American Orthodox priests to teach their children about the “wonders of creation” and the “Orthodox Ways of Knowing?”

If Indigenous Ways of Knowing are spiritual, then like other spiritual teachings it doesn’t belong in a secular classroom.

If Buddhists and Orthodox Christians have to leave lessons about their incense usage at home,  Indigenous Ways of knowing should leave stories about the “sacred prayers” of the peace pipe at home as well.

What do these folks mean when they say Indigenous Ways of Knowing is narrative?

They claim that “Indigenous knowledge is conveyed using a narrative. Stories contain the knowledge that is needed to live in a good way. Transmitting vital teachings without preaching.”

That sounds like it’s OK, until you start to actually think about it. Hate to break to these guys, but telling moral stories is one of the oldest forms of preaching. It’s what that Jesus guy was doing when he spoke in parables.

All this shows is that they want to preach to children in everything but name.

 

TOPIC THREE “Sources of Indigenous Knowledge”

The module lists  “1. Traditional knowledge, 2. Empirical Knowledge, 3. Revealed knowledge” as the sources of Indigenous knowledge.

First off, how do we know that what the Indigenous think is “traditional knowledge” actually is what the Indigenous pre-European contact actually believed?

If everything is passed down from word of mouth, then how do we know that pre-European-contact-indigenous groups actually believed the stories that we currently claim are “traditional” native stories? Isn’t it possible that some of these stories are post-contact historical retro-projections?

Second, they’re misusing the word “Empirical.” Empiricism is an epistemological philosophy invented by Europeans invented in the 17th and 18th century.

If all they mean by “Empirical Knowledge” is that the Indigenous saw, felt, smelt, heard, and tasted things then whop-tie-do. There’s nothing special about that.

Welcome to the human condition. It certainly doesn’t make the indigenous way of knowing anymore distinct from anybody else’s way of knowing.

Third, how are we going to teach our children the Indigenous Way of Knowing if it comes to us in dreams and revelations?

The module defines “Revealed Knowledge” as “dreams, visions, and intuitions.” all of which are un-teachable.

What happened to citations? Verifiable and falsifiable hypotheses? The scientific method? Can teachers consider knowledge credible simply because it came to them in a dream?

 

TOPIC FOUR “Indigenous Axiology, Values, and Ethics “

In this part of the module, the focus is on the values and ethics within Indigenous Ways of Knowing.

There is nothing here that Ancient Greek Virtue philosophers didn’t already propose. Above all else, at least when the ancient Greeks spoke about ethics, they could write their thoughts down and have future generations check their notes.

This way each generation wasn’t working from scratch and from the time torn tatters of broken miscommunications found in all oral traditions.

After all, to quote the module, “the way one one comes to know is as important as what one comes to know.”

 

TOPIC FIVE “Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science Side by Side”

Here comes the fun part.

The module is actually putting this Indigenous Ways of Knowing nonsense on par with Western Science.

The module starts by denouncing science as nothing more than a Eurocentric and Imperialist tool to push aside the ideas of other cultures.

“The modern Western World developed in tandem with the expansion of European colonial empires. With colonial imperialism came an emphasis on the centrality and superiority of European theories and ideas also known as Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism has used Western science to discredit and delegitimize and marginalize Indigenous knowledges … This process has also been described as Cognitive imperialism (Battiste, 1986)”

Let us concede that Europeans turned to tribal peoples and spoke out against superstition, regional folk lore, and mislead mysticism. Is that really so bad?

Let us further concede that Europeans were even quick to push aside useful knowledge possessed by the natives because of pompous and ignorant racism. Does that mean that suddenly the epistemology of Western Science is on par with Indigenous Ways of Knowing?

Is all epistemology, all ways of knowing things, equal? Of course not.

If not, how does Indigenous Ways of Knowing compare with Western Science. Luckily for us, the module measures them both against one another in a Venn diagram.

CommonGroundCircles

^Cited from the geniuses at OISE^

The module explains how the Venn diagram presents “characteristics of both systems side by side to illustrate the different emphases, assumptions and outcomes of knowing within each system.”

Notice how they didn’t put “holistic” in the middle. Are they claiming that Western science, which studies the universal laws that permeate everything from to quarks and galaxies, is not holistic? Do they even know what Western Science is?

Apparently not, considering how they put “practical experimentation” as exclusively indigenous. It’s not like Western Science conducts any practical experimentation … Oh wait! It does! That’s what laboratories are for!

Who do they think comes up with the vaccines, generates new space aged materials, and increases agricultural yields?!

I’m just glad that they recognized that Western Science, and not Traditional Naive Knowledge, possess “global verification; hypothesis falsification; quantitative written records; communication of procedures, evidence, and theory; mathematical models;” and most importantly “skepticism” because God knows belief in Indigenous Knowledge requires blind faith.

The fact that they didn’t put “limited to evidence and explanation within the physical world” in middle just goes to show that “Traditional Native Knowledge” is just more religious neo-paganism.

Does this belong in a secular school system?

 

TOPIC 6 & 7 “Indigenous Knowledge and Learning, Re-imagining Education” & “Suggested Activities”

In these parts of the module, they argue that educators should “Re-imagine Education” and conduct activities with their students on  “Indigenous Ways of Knowing.”

This includes sharing “with your fellow learners this living representation of First Nations Holistic Life Long Learning model Created by the Canada Council on Learning and the Aboriginal Learning Centre.”

Remember that this module is designed for the teachers of your children.

Is anybody considering home school?

 

DISCLAIMER 

The module, like any faulty product, comes with a disclaimer.

It states, “Remember that the boundaries between the two are not so hard and fast and that both kinds of knowledge can exhibit different aspects. Most importantly, there are instances where indigenous knowledge and Western Science overlap.”

Personally, I completely agree. But insomuch as they define describe what Indigenous Ways of Knowledge is in contrast to Western Science, the more I feel like I need chemotherapy to get rid of this mental cancer.

 

The photo shows, “Le guerrier Iroquois,” by Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, hand-tinted etching, done in 1797.

What Is Thinking?

Over the years, higher education has become thoroughly vocationalized, and people come to university and college expecting to be trained for the job market.

More and more, society sees the academy as nothing more than a training facility where specific and transferable skills are acquired by individuals which can then be translated into careers and jobs in the marketplace.

Inherently there is nothing wrong about such a view of education; jobs and careers are fundamental to a happy life. But there is an essential problem here, because a primary component is being consistently ignored, which we can get to by asking a simple question.

What guarantees a career or a job or a paycheck in the first place? It is not proficiency in skill – rather, it is the context in which this skill is to be practiced. And this context, of course, is society. It is only within the context of a good society that jobs, careers – in short, the good life – can be guaranteed.

But if education is nothing other than training efficient workers who only know how to apply their skills in job situations – who will manage the needs of society so that it continues to be good, continues to be that context in which jobs and careers, and the good life, are to be guaranteed? If no one is educated in taking care of the good society, will society continue to be good? There is a strong and direct co-relationship between prosperity and the good society.

In our own political and cultural context, the good society is the liberal democracy, which depends upon the idea that all of us must work together to maintain the goodness of our society.

In order to do so, we must be educated in the wisdom of the liberal democratic tradition. But if we only worry about training for jobs, who will have the knowledge to ensure that our society remains both liberal and democratic – that it retains its goodness?

And what are the characteristics of such a society? They are ideals that we all aspire to and expect our society to provide – namely, freedom, personal worth, individual rights, and a government entirely answerable to the people.

Notice none of these expectations depend upon skill, upon being a good worker. And none of these expectations have come about as a result of industry’s efforts.

Industry can function in any type of society. It has loyalty only to profit. These expectations are, of course, ideals – and ideals require two things: education – not skill – and humane thinking.

 

How We Are Expected to Think

The enduring emphasis of skill in the educational system is also an emphasis on two kinds of thinking, and the neglect of a third kind. Skill is closely related to know-how, or technical knowledge, and to analytical, or scientific, knowledge.

The former is repetitive and performative, in that a skill is repeated in order to produce the same result. Scientific knowledge seeks to explain or predict; it can do no more.

For example, many children are prodigies with mathematics or music, in that they have acquired the skill to repeat notes or numerical patterns. Their expertise, or skill, is marvelous to witness – but no one turns to them for guidance on issues of freedom, individuality, or responsible government. Why?

Because we know that skills are not higher-level thinking. In the same way, a physicist understands fully how to establish models that can test natural laws and predict what nature may or may not do – but we do not consult this person about matters pertaining to the good society, or love. Why?

Because physics is analytical and cannot be used to understand goodness or love. Despite these obvious handicaps in scientific and technical knowledge, we still demand that higher education worry only about training workers. While everyone is functioning smoothly in industry – who is looking after the functioning of society?

Perhaps the reason for voter apathy, for example, and low voter turn-out may directly be related to this question.

There is a third kind of knowledge, which may be labeled practical wisdom. It is not technical, explanatory, or predictive. It is concerned with ideals, with formulating judgments and making decisions, and it directly relates to the way we encounter the world around us and the way we participate in society.

In other words, there is a specific kind of thinking which directly relates to the good society. Practical wisdom is about ideals. Life is always greater than tangible, material things.

Indeed, what is more important to human beings – happiness or skill?

To worry about skills is to desire to become a robot. To worry about happiness is to understand our humanity – because to be happy each of us must reflect upon what truth is and what goodness is, and each of us must create meaning in our lives. Skills can do neither of these things.

To be happy, to have meaning and value, we need to think critically, in the true sense of the term.

 

The photo shows, “Man at his Desk,” by Georg Friedrich Kersting, painted in 1811.

Dialogos: Dr. Widdowson on Exposing the Aboriginal Industry

The controversial Dr. Frances Widdowson joins us in a talk about exposing the “Aboriginal Industry” in Canada.

The interview touches on her book “Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation,” Ontario school’s push to teach “Indigenous Ways of Knowing,” and Dr. Widdowson’s most recent controversial presentation, “Does University Indigenization Threaten Open Inquiry,” at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Dr. Widdowson is a professor from Mount Royal University in Calgary. She was recently invited to Lindsay Shepherd‘s Laurier’s Society of Free Speech and Open Inquiry to give a talk on Indigenization.  In addition, Widdowson runs her own blog, “Offended by Offense,” and is a coordinator for the Society of Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS).

 

 

 

The photo shows, “Onigoheriago,” one of the Mohawk Kings who visited Queen Anne. Painted in 1710, by John Verelst.

The Loss Of Reflection

Here is an invitation to enter into a great conversation that has been part of the human experience for a few thousand years – it is an invitation to be mindful human beings. We all possess an innate reflective nature, and we all want a thoughtful habit of mind. To make such reflection part of developing the character of a good human being was once the purpose of education.

But now, education has lost its purpose, and therefore it has drifted off into seas that it can no longer negotiate – skills training of any sort, which really means of no sort.

One such skill that received undue attention (because it is an artificial creature, fabricated to make it seem like education is doing something valuable, when it is not) – is something called “critical thinking.”

Much has been written on this “important” topic, but usually we are none the wiser for all this great endeavor – reading is on the decline, and attentions spans are getting shorter. In other words, how can you have critical thinking when no one reads anything longer than one or two paragraph?

It is is not a surprise, therefore, that those that promote “critical thinking” (often to safeguard their own salaries) want to reduce thinking to “a method” that can be effectively and profitably taught and learned.

This ends up a lengthy and meaningless list of “fallacies,” which must be avoided. This is all backed-up by things called “deductive” and “inductive” logic, so you can latch on to faulty conclusions, premises and arguments. Of course, how you actually apply of these so-called “fallacies” to real life is never discussed.

Education, through such means, becomes a bag of tricks, which are supposed to transform you into some sort of super-sleuth who can ferret out any and all types of shoddy thinking in order to destroy it.

In other words, there is now a big disconnect between what we are taught and what we are expected to do in life. This has led to the loss of reflection. Not that humans don’t reflect anymore – but that reflection is conditioned by a culture in which reflection doesn’t exist.

Human beings need to understand the content and scope of their reflection – because our thinking alone defines us and then creates the society we want to inhabit.

Reflection cannot, and should not, be a set of rules of a diluted form of logic, taught by the illogical. Rather, what we need is not a list of dos and don’ts – but a the creation of a habit – the habit of using our minds with the greatest care.

What we need now is a turning back to the true purpose of education – the creation of the mind, which can transcend all the urgent desires of instinct. It is reflection alone that makes the man.

 

Keith Farneham is pursuing a PhD in ancient philosophy.
The photo shows, “Renoir” by Frédéric Bazille, painted in 1867.

Self-Annihilation?

Knowledge has been successfully hijacked – because its purpose is no longer truth. We live in a world governed by a particular worldview that no longer sees truth as the foremost necessity to the good life.

This leaves only feelings which alone are truly authentic. In other words, opinions are far better than thought, and reason is merely another system of oppression. All previous pursuits of learning were therefore merely constructs contrived by dominant groups to sustain and extend their power over the oppressed.

Such is the post-truth world that we now inhabit, where reality can only be governed by human emotion, which apparently demands socio-political justice for the “historically” downtrodden and ignored.

This is often labeled as, “postmodernism,” but this is inaccurate. The hydra indeed has many heads.

In fact, it’s best to call it, The Grand-Conglomerate Ideology (GCI), whose texture is woven from divergent threads, namely, Marxism, relativism, feminism, eugenics, corporatism, Stalinism, Hiterlism, Protestantism, secularism, scientism, multiculturalism, atheism, postfoundationalism, naturalism, technologism, transhumanism, transgenderism, environmentalism, progressivism, and nihilism.

The tentacles of this beast reach into all facets of life. The very purpose of western society is now simply an extension of GCI. Nothing lies outside of it. Even our habit of mind no longer makes sense without GCI. Our society exists to justify it, and our politics and laws sustain it. All validations of human existence can now only exist in the purview of GCI.

People may content themselves with one or more threads of its latticework, but that it is merely the play of labels, for each thread leads to the same telos.

And what is that telos – what is the purpose, or chief end of GCI?

Very simply – annihilation, or what the Buddhists call nirvana. We have only to look at the “virtues” which are held up as laudatory – abortion, anti-genderism, anti-nationalism, antinatalism. Why are each of these an inherent good, when each of them also denies humanity its dignity?

But why annihilation? Why the deep loathing of humanity itself? Again, very simply because we have managed to relegate the transcendent into the realm of the ridiculous. In other words, when humanity denies God, it stops being human, and can no longer justify its own existence. Its ideal no longer becomes life (both physical and ghostly), but its very opposite – that is, death.

When we can no longer believe in a panoramic purpose for all of humanity, we veer into a purpose closer to hand – murder in all its manifestations. Why do all tyrants want to kill as many people as possible? Why the carnage of totalitarian states in the twentieth-century?

The spilling of blood is a very necessary element in humanity’s worship of itself. This is why human sacrifice was an essential component of paganism, for the pagan gods were simply extensions of humanity. It’s violence alone that makes us feel human when we no longer know how to look beyond ourselves. All this was once known as, “evil.”

Is this what Simone Weil meant when she called Aristotle “the bad tree that bore bad fruit?” Aristotle turned the human gaze inwards, and by doing so, he mechanized thought, made it a system. All of creation thus became an enclosed system, a self-contained micro-world functioning in an endless plethora of other systems.

But so what? And more importantly, what is to be done (to borrow a phrase form Nikolai Chernyshevsky)?

First question first – so what? In the words of Rémi Brague, “If God doesn’t exist, then why should humanity exist?” We may content ourselves with diversions like saving the planet, or seeking social justice and the like. But this is only delaying the more obvious question – what’s the point of being alive? Should the planet be saved and humanity destroyed?

These may appear to be stark queries, but they do point us to the very heart of our darkness – we no longer really believe that we should continue to exist, because we no longer believe that life has any true purpose. Everything else is a diversion until nirvana.

Second, what is to be done? But to really answer this question we have to accept that humanity actually has a purpose on this planet – and a life beyond it. Fighting the hydra requires far more than clever slogans; it requires that we return value to that which is moral.

Given our deep addiction to “-isms,” we have made ourselves morally bankrupt – in other words, we have made ourselves receptive to all kinds of foolishness, for though we might have displaced God as the giver of meaning, we have been unable to replace him with anything meaningful. None of the “’-isms” can assume the role of god, no matter how hard their valiant followers may try. Therein lies the various conflicts of our time.

As the thought of John Hare shows, humanity cannot be moral without God – it can certainly try (by seeking rights and justice), but it will fail because there is an unbridgeable gap between the human ability for goodness and the human duty to do the good.

Why be good? Ability and duty can only come together via God, in that morality must a purpose – not a reward, but a purpose. Here people often misunderstand God as some dispenser of rewards and punishment. That is a very childish view, though it does serve to advance one strand of GCI (atheism).

Given the omnipresent hydra, humanity must return to its root, which is God. But not any god – only the God of the Judeo-Christian faith. God has made us to live life through morality, and we should live this way because He has made us so. A life outside morality is not human at all – it’s not even bestial. It’s meaningless, for even beasts have meaning. Only man can give himself meaninglessness.

To continue with Hare, we must answer two important questions – Can we be good? And, why should we be good? Neither question can be answered without God.

To return to GCI, it’s now easy to see that it is an attempt to find a substitute for God, an all-inclusive transcendence which might provide some sort of God-less meaning to life.

However, humanity is incapable of providing justification for itself, let alone why it must be good. GCI quickly erodes into tyrannical tribalism, where baser desires of winning and subduing become foremost, because humanity cannot free itself from its condition to create truth. Humanity can only discover truth, not create it.

Likewise, humanity cannot create morality; it can only live within it, or outside it, because it’s one of the necessities of human existence like air and water.

The first step in breaking free from the grip of the hydra is to destroy the ground in which it’s rooted. Since the GCI is rooted in the education system, citizens needs to dismantle the entire education system which has now become nothing mora than an intricate mind-abuse system that destroys the minds of the young.

Parents need to stop sending their children into the maws of this Moloch. They need to stop sacrificing their children upon the high altar of GCI.

Instead, parents need to build independent schools, colleges, universities where their children may once again learn the richer form of human life – one rooted firmly in the morality guaranteed by the Judeo-Christian God.

In other words, parents alone have the ability to starve the monster of CGI to death. Otherwise, the beast will only grow more and more powerful, with each child that it devours. All of society needs to say – enough!

 

The photo shows, “The Death of Chatterton,” by Henry Wallis, painted in 1856.

A New Republic Of Letters

We have set culture above and before life, when it ought to be behind and below – it is a reaction to life. We must stop putting the cart before the horse. (José Ortega y Gasset)
Telling people what they already know ensures belief.  (Gorgias)

Universities have had their day. The grand experiment they once embarked on, of educating everyone, letting not one mind go to waste, is in its death-throes, if not dead already.

All universities worth their salt are now ardent hucksters – “Get our degree that will get you the job.” Since they have the facilities to warehouse and supposedly produce workers, they have reinvented themselves, more or less successfully, as organizations best suited to look after the supposed needs of industry.

They now sell a very attractive package: You don’t need knowledge (or what once was known as wisdom) to be successful – you need skills.

Professors are technicians who teach the structures of efficiency in the guise of a discipline.

Values (once known as virtue, or morality) are questionable at best and rightly jettisoned. The only real value in society is money. Efficiency is the watchword.

Despite lip-service, thinking is not worth the investment. Universities should in turn free themselves of the ruse of promoting knowledge and fully become training institutes for industry.

It is what students want – and according to the vise-like logic of industry, the customer is always right.

So, enough laments, enough screeds! There are too many of those already.

In the famous words of Nikolai Chernyshevsky – “What is to be done?”

We who think the Humanities are important to life need to stop depending on universities and look to other ways of establishing a new Republic of Letters. Here are some suggestions.

First, there are still enough people out there who believe that literature, philosophy, history, foreign languages (the Humanities), speculative science are essential, if democracy is going to survive in any meaningful way.

Why? Because the clearest manifestation of democracy is individual freedom. This does not mean, do what you want. Nor does it mean the freedom to consume as much as possible.

Rather, freedom demands two things: the knowledge to sustain the good society (where each person has dignity and worth); and the wisdom to ask good questions (asking questions is the highest and truest expression of individual liberty.

However, a good worker is a team player and has no need to ask questions; this builds efficiency).

How does one acquire such knowledge (knowing how and why reality does what it does) and wisdom (the extension of such knowledge to construct both a good life and a good society)? Through the Humanities and speculative science.

Again, why? Because they force us to think. And what is thinking? Simply that ability to explain reality (good or bad) – without relying on “answers” from an authority figure (for example, a search engine).

Thinking is the slow building of confidence in our own minds. It is what Bruno Snell once called, “the discovery of the mind.”

Notice how the notion of values (or morality) is creeping in – only thinking constructs freedom – because morality means having the understanding to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas (good ideas are those that promote individual worth; bad ideas do not), and then having the wisdom to know how to replace bad ideas with good ones in society. (This has nothing to do with “raising awareness” and other emotional acts).

Second, the new Republic of Letters needs another method of patronage. The universities used to provide such patronage, but that is no longer so, since their “customers” no longer want to buy expensive, useless degrees in “bird courses.”

Therefore, the Humanities and speculative science need to rediscover an ancient model – that of the peripatetic philosophers.

To do so, they need to fully divest themselves of the university. In this way, they will also “cleanse” themselves of the dross that has accumulated over the years (especially in the Humanities).

Dross, such as, Po-Mo jargon and the tiresome micro departments that actively promote the riding of hobbyhorses. This cleansing will allow the Humanities and speculative science to “own” thinking once again.

How did those ancient Greek philosophers gain patronage? By organizing what we might call seminars in public places.

There, they presented what they knew, and what they had thought through, in a brief lecture, followed by an extensive question-and-question session, where new ideas were discovered.

The patronage came at the end of the seminar, where the peripatetic philosopher would ask the audience to give whatever monitory value they thought the lecture and discussion were worth.

It was a free-will donation – not a cost. If you thought it was all worth nothing, then you gave nothing. Again, notice how this method of patronage is deeply associated with values (morality) – good ideas are essential to the good society and they have recognizable worth.

Third, a self-sustaining and independent Republic of Letters will finally and thoroughly free both the Humanities and speculative science from the tyranny of grades which work hand-in-glove with credentialism (the entire industry of university degrees).

This also means freedom from trying to demonstrate currency and relevance through publication in journals that no one reads.

Freedom from the monolith of tenure which only embeds ‘birds of a feather” hiring practices.

And most important of all – freedom from ludicrous Po-Mo jargon that no one really understands but everyone keeps on using – even though it is now very long in the tooth.

If you’re looking for some serious Po-Mo nonsense that you can pass as your very own [a boon for graduate students and professors that need to publish fast], then here is the perfect software for you…Introducing the Postmodern Essay Generator – guaranteed to spit out essays that are impossible to understand, but sound profound).

Perfect for any Humanities course, where you have to churn out essays that no one is supposed to understand (and they’ll be too embarrassed to ask you to explain, for fear they’ll be found out that they too haven’t a clue). Here is the link to this amazing workhorse ==>  Postmodern Essay Generator. (Just keep hitting Refresh to keep getting fresh Po-Mo nonsense essays).

Such is the circus that passes for an education.

The Humanities and speculative science are about thinking, and thinking is about life. The Welsh poet, W.H. Davies published a poem in 1911, entitled, “Leisure” in which he observed: “A poor life, this if, full of care/ We have no time to stand and stare.”

The need to wonder, to ask, “what if,” to feel awe, to imagine, to transcend personal conditions and shortcomings – to finally understand how to answer two of the most important questions that confront each one of us: How shall I be good? Where do I belong? Such will be the wealth of the new Republic of Letters.

This new Republic will only become possible when the Humanities and speculative science at last break free of the prison of universities and in doing so bring about the much-needed renaissance, so that democracy may once again find its true purpose – not cash but the currency of good ideas, which never lose value.

 

The photo shows, “The Beekeper,” by Nicholai Bogatov, painted in 1875.