Maverick Philosopher

The Purpose of Schooling

According to Anthony Esolen,

The purpose of schooling—which is not the same as education—is to encourage people to express confident platitudes, which they are pleased to call their opinions, about things they know nothing of. This is far worse than ignorance. 

Esolen is (usually) a good writer and a clear thinker who often communicates important truths. So why does he begin his essay so irresponsibly? Journalistic responsibility requires that the writer not tamper with the established meanings of words and phrases. (See Merriam-Webster.) That's what wokesters do, as witness their hijacking  of the word 'equity.' (See Merriam-Webster.)

Has Esolen suffered a reverse-metanoia? I rather doubt it.  Am I being overly punctilious? I don't think so.

Once again, language matters!  (587 entries and counting) Dismounting my high horse, I now return to ruminating over modal collapse arguments against the doctrine of divine simplicity.

Somerville/Blondel on Education

Once widely understood, now forgotten:

It is not expedient that all truths be indiscriminately communicated to every student regardless of age or temperament. Premature truths can do more harm than good; for just as it is criminal to anticipate the age of puberty with indiscrete revelations, similarly, intellectual irresponsibility on the part of the teacher can be vicious. Between the desire to tell all and to tell nothing, the educator must find a middle path. For example, if there is a real value to be realized in educating elementary school children in love of country, it is questionable whether the teacher should make it his or her business to make a parade of all the skeletons in the history of American or French diplomacy or military enterprises on the grounds that the child has the right to know all. Again, while the instructor may himself be passing through a phase of disillusionment, he is not really carrying out his trust if he seeks to poison other minds because of his own momentary personal problems.

James M. Somerville, Total Commitment: Blondel’s L’Action (Washington, D.C.: Corpus Books, 1968), pp. 161-162. A very good book!  It merits the coveted MavPhil plenary endorsement.

Is Graduate School Really That Bad?

100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School is now at reason  #98.  Despite its unrelenting negativity, prospective applicants  to graduate programs will find the site  useful.  I cannot criticize it for being negative since that is its implied purpose: to compile 100 reasons not to go.  But there is something whiny and wimpy about it.

Suppose you are paid to spend five years, from age 22 to age 27, studying in depth a subject you love and have an aptitude for in the idyllic environs of a college campus.  You have been give tuition remission and a stipend on which to live.  You really enjoy reading, writing, thinking, and studying more than anything else.   You have good sense and avoid the folly of assuming debt in the form of student loans.  You live within your very modest means and have the character to resist the siren songs of a society bent on crazy consumption.   You understand that a little monkishness never hurt anyone, and might even do your soul some good.

You spend five years enjoying all the perquisites of academic life: a beautiful environment, stimulating people, library privileges, an office, a flexible work schedule, and the like.  At age 27 you are granted the Ph.D.  But there are few jobs, and you knew that all along.  You make a serious attempt at securing a position in your field but fail.  So you go on to something else either with or without some further training.

Have you wasted your time?  Not by my lights.  Hell, you've been paid to do what you love doing!  What's to piss and moan about?  You have been granted a glorious extension of your relatively carefree collegiate years.  Five more years of being a student, sans souci, in some exciting place like Boston.  Five more years of contact with age- and class-appropriate members of the opposite sex and thus five more years of opportunity to find a suitable mate.  (But if you marry and have kids while a grad student, then you are a fool.  Generally speaking, of course.) 

Of course, if your goal in life is to pile up as much loot as possible in the shortest possible time, then stay away from (most) graduate programs.  But if the life of the mind is your thing, go for it!  What's to kvetch about? Are you washed up at 27 or 28 because you couldn't land a tenure-track position?  You have until about age 40 to make it in America. 

In the interests of full disclosure, however, I should say that I was one of the lucky ones. I spent five years in graduate school and received my Ph.D. at age 28. In the same year I accepted a tenure-track appointment and six years later I had tenure at age 34.

For more on this and cognate topics, see my Academia category.

Another Leftist Assault on Merit

New York's Bozo de Blasio goes after a great high school,

Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of the New York City school system.

In a better world, we wouldn’t care about the racial and ethnic composition of the Stuyvesant student body. That it’s the strongest it can be, in academic terms, would be all that mattered.

Here, for purposes of the world we actually live in, is the breakdown of the entering freshman class at Stuyvesant:

Asian — 613
White — 151
Hispanic — 27
Black — 10

These numbers don’t sit well with Mayor Bill de Blasio. Interestingly, though, his son just graduated from Brooklyn Tech, another elite high school with a similar racial and ethnic balance.

De Blasio proposes to do away with the entrance exam altogether. As Richard Cohen, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post writes, this would destroy a system that “epitomized the American dream and — as [President] Trump might say — made America great.”

The Liberal Destruction of Public Education

Sol Stern, What I Saw in the Schools.  Excerpt:

Many of my sons’ teachers were trained at Columbia University’s Teachers College or the nearby Bank Street College of Education. At these citadels of progressivism, future educators were inculcated in the “child-centered” approach to classroom instruction. All children, in this view, were “natural learners” who—with just a little guidance from teachers—could “construct their own knowledge.” By the same token, progressive-ed doctrine considered it a grave sin for teachers to engage in direct instruction of knowledge (dismissed as “mere facts”). The traditional, content-based instruction that had worked so well for my generation of immigrant children from poor and working-class families was now dismissed as “drill-and-kill” teaching that robbed kids of their imagination. Progressives also rejected the old-fashioned American idea, going back to the Founders, that the nation’s schools should follow a coherent, grade-by-grade curriculum that not only included the three Rs but also introduced children to our civilizational inheritance.

I am tempted to explain just how wrong this is.  But I will resist the temptation.  If you are a regular reader of this weblog, then you don't need it explained to you.  But if you are the sort of  liberal who accepts the above claptrap, then you don't need explanations, you need treatment.  Please seek it for your own good.

Read the rest if you can bear to.

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An article by Jason Riley, a black conservative I highly recommend.  Unfortunately, in this brief piece he does not penetrate to the philosophical heart of the matter by making the important point that education is not a legitimate function for the Federal government.  Education is properly conducted by parents, families, and the local institutions of civil society such as local schools, churches, clubs, and the like.  The Left, being totalitarian, hates these institutions of civil society that occupy the buffer zone between the naked individual and the Leviathan.

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