The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, [...]
Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
Wendell Berry on the End of Education
Posted in Education, Wendell Berry on January 7, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Alexander Pope 1.0
Posted in Education, Knowledge on May 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon. Alexander Pope
The Foundation of the Social Graces
Posted in Education, Life on March 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Every child should be taught what used to be called the social graces: good manners, clear speech, the art of dinner-table conversation, sketching, singing, competence in playing a musical instrument, and even ballroom dancing. Upon such simple foundations as these, true civilizations are built. Michael Dirda, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life, pg. [...]
“A glorified form of vocational training”
Posted in Education on March 24, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get [...]
Making Minds, Not Careers
Posted in Education on March 24, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive. Aren’t kids at elite schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic sense? Don’t they work harder than [...]
Telamon of Arcadia and War
Posted in Education, War on March 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
It is one thing to study war and another to live the warrior’s life. Telamon of Arcadia
The Hazard of Specialization
Posted in Education, Life, Technology on August 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The first, and best known, hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists—people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for [...]
Twain on Schooling
Posted in Education on November 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. Mark Twain
