Tagged: teaching

Reflections on Three Private Activities: Talking, Writing, Reading

A student asks me what I make of the fact that she often talks to herself while walking, either repeating words she has recently said to someone or imagining what she would say in situations yet to come. My reply: I talk to myself while walking all the time. Sometimes I suddenly catch myself talking a bit too audibly, or with too much...

Ideas, Language, and Communication

The classic cartoon image for discovery is a light bulb appearing above a character’s head. This is perfectly apt, and the use of light, especially a source of light, as a metaphor for the actualization of the mind, including the divine mind, is standard throughout the history of figurative expression. It must be remembered, however, that an idea as such brings light only...

Skipping to the Conclusion

Five years ago, I posted my book, “The Case Against Public Education,” here in Limbo, both as an e-book download and in a readable online version. It made no discernible difference to anything, of course. Five years is rarely long enough for serious ideas to take root, particularly ideas which run counter to all the social conventions and intellectual trends of the day;...

Philosophic Principles, Part One

Purposefulness. It is better to die never having found the answer than to live never having heard the question.

Profit. Never seek material gain from the best thing you can do; for that is the literal meaning of selling one’s soul. You will not get it back.

Teaching. Those who have just opened their eyes must be led toward the sun….

Survival of the Fittest: Teaching vs. Normalcy

Every society, without exception, tends to harden its founding presuppositions and hopes into a set of stated and unstated rules for living. Gradually, the great character and thought needed to bring a society into being give way to the forced teaching and rote learning of the simplified and simplifying rules deemed necessary to preserve that society. And this in turn reduces maturation to...

Words to Live By, Or Not

“Do as I say, not as I do.” This has for centuries been the model of bad advice, or rather of poor advisors. However, when you are speaking to yourself, it is precisely the correct admonition, and the hardest good advice to follow. There are more teachers and soldiers than there are members of any other politically essential vocation. Yet there are fewer...

On Pleasure and Learning

Philosophic hedonism.— The soul naturally inclines toward beliefs, solutions, behaviors, and aims that promise the greatest pleasure. Education is primarily the process of unlearning the childhood weakness for mistaking the quickest or most immediate pleasure for the greatest pleasure. The educated person is thus the one who habitually forgoes the near or easy pleasure in favor of the distant, rarefied one, and the...

Guidance and Independence

It is not weak, nor any contradiction of the desire for independence, to look to others’ opinions in assessing one’s own thoughts and behavior. The mistake or weakness is in looking to others’ opinions at random — looking to the crowd, or to the popular, or to the powerful. One has already made a great advance in self-knowledge and independence who is able...

New Year’s Resolutions

Try not to hate humans en masse, no matter how infuriatingly inhuman and inhumane they collectively become. Remind myself every day that a population raised from earliest childhood to belittle itself and aggrandize the state can hardly be expected to view itself and the world any differently than in accordance with its lifelong training. Consider humanity, for at least ten minutes a day,...

Standards

The best writer writes as the most intimate friend speaks, namely as though he were talking to himself, and for himself. He also hesitates to take his writing too seriously, and may even be suspicious of it. The best teacher is not the one who can answer all your questions, but rather the one who knows how to ask questions, and what the...