Category: Death by Education
In a recent essay, “The Ultimate Labor-Saving Device,” I recounted my response to a student’s questions about artificial intelligence, related to my previous piece, “The Intellectual Welfare State.” A central theme of that earlier discussion was the likely, or perhaps inevitable, retarding effects of increasing AI dependency on human intellectual development. This time, prodded by the same thoughtful student’s subsequent correspondence, we cut...
Here in the land that calls itself The Republic of Korea, daily life carries on as usual. The end of the fall semester is upon us, with its typical stress-inducing round of exams that prove nothing, resulting in grades that serve no rational purpose, followed by days of bureaucratic hoop-jumping from the instructors as we satisfy the artificial requirements of a worldwide educational...
All of us are born in a cave, Socrates teaches (Republic VII), staring at shadows cast upon the back wall by images held in front of a fire behind us. From this starting point, he explains that education is the process of turning around in our chairs to see the fire, the objects dancing before it, and the men holding those objects, and...
The Olympic Games are in Paris this summer, where men routinely urinate on the streets, so much so that the Macron government tried several years ago to reduce the grotesque effects of this Parisian crudity — the new language of love, I suppose — by installing “discreet” pee buckets disguised as planters throughout the city. Thus, people with the bladders of seven-year-olds and...
For several years, the great debate about so-called artificial intelligence has been whether or not it will end the world as we know it. The answer is in: Yes it will, and in the most efficient and literal sense. No, it may not lead to the aggressive takeover of the planet by an out-of-control army of conscious and mean-spirited robots — although it...
The purpose of higher education, as originally founded in the solid ground of the classical philosophic life, was to foster the civilized notions that there is no real safety in numbers; that truth is not amenable to popular opinion; that the adage “knowledge is power” is not reversible; that detached, quiet reflection is the only antidote to the intellectual poison of the public...
Contrary to the implicit and socially-imposed assumption of our era, it is not inherently antisemitic to disagree with, or even to soundly criticize, the policies or actions of the Israeli government, including during a time of conflict. The Israeli government is comprised of the elected representatives of the people of Israel. If Israelis themselves decided that they no longer trusted the leadership of...
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...
Jordan Peterson has a school. — The most inflated ego and most compromised mind in today’s world of internet celebrity gurus imagines he is going to make oodles of money by pretending to offer people some sort of university equivalency certificate from an online teaching institute named (what else?) Peterson Academy. Of course, his “school” will star all the best educators, because who...
North American Muslims, by a large majority, strongly oppose the use of public schools to promote the sexual deviancy normalization agenda of the radical left. Do they take this position because: (a) they have been tricked by the anti-democratic American extreme right wing, as Justin Trudeau has alleged, in a brilliant example of classic Trudeauesque snobbish condescension; (b) they are too ignorant to...