Striking Education Quotes

They're so cold, these scholars! May lightning strike their food so that their mouths learn how to eat fire!

Locating the village elders, he said to them, “I think that we are in for a bad time. The American Sky Soldiers are coming by helicopter and the usual things the Americans do of air strikes by fighter-bombers and by B52 large bombers is starting at Long Phuoc! I fear the worst!

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.

            The future belongs to the people, and gradually, or in one strike, they will take power, here and in every country.                   The terrible thing is the people need to be educated, and this they cannot do before taking power, only after. They can only learn at the cost of their own mistakes, which will be very serious and will cost many innocent lives.

President Barack Obama and his family. (I was respectful, I believe, but I told him I did not like his drone strikes on Pakistan, that when they kill one bad person, innocent people are killed, too, and terrorism spreads more. I also told him that if America spent less money on weapons and war and more on education, the world would be a better place. If God has given you a voice, I decided, you must use it even if it is to disagree with the president of the United States.)

The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.

Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.

The aim of education. — Education: to discover but not merely to imitate. Learning techniques without inward experiencing can only lead to superficiality.

Instead of being regarded as intelligent or knowledgeable, many a woman would rather be regarded as beautiful or good in the kitchen; many a man, as handsome or good in bed.

It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.

Depression is now ten times as prevalent as it was in 1960, and it strikes at a much younger age. The mean age of a person’s first episode of depression forty years ago was 29.5, while today it is 14.5 years. This is a paradox, since every objective indicator of well-being—purchasing power, amount of education, availability of music, and nutrition—has been going north, while every indicator of subjective well-being has been going south. How is this epidemic to be explained?

The owners of factories are more concerned than other classes and interests in the intelligence of their laborers. When the latter are well-educated and the former are disposed to deal justly, controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factious considerations.

Motherhood seems to be a no-win battle: however you decide to do (or not do) it, someone’s going to be criticizing you. You went to too great lengths trying to conceive. You didn’t go to great enough lengths. You had the baby too young. You should have kept the baby even though you were young. You shouldn’t have waited so long to try and have a baby. You’re a too involved mother. You’re not involved enough because you let your child play on the playground alone. It never ends. It strikes me that while all this judgment goes on, the options available to women become fewer and fewer. I’m not even (just) talking about the right to choose—across the U.S., women have less access to birth control, health care, reproductive education, and post-partum support. So we give women less information about their bodies and reproduction, less control over their bodies, and less support during and after pregnancy—and then we criticize them fiercely for whatever they end up doing. This

What strikes me now is why did they send the boys away? Why don’t boys get educated about menstruation? Is it because the teachers think girls will be embarrassed? I feel like the secrecy of it, the action of segregating us, sends the message that we should be ashamed. That our periods are something to hide from the opposite sex.

Well," he said with equanimity, "you see, in my opinion there is no point at all in talking about music. I never talk about music. What reply, then, was I to make to your very able and just remarks? You were perfectly right in all you said. But, you see, I am a musician, not a professor, and I don't believe that, as regards music, there is the least point in being right. Music does not depend on being right, on having good taste and education and all that." "Indeed. Then what does it depend on?" "On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as possible and with all the intensity of which one is capable. That is the point, Monsieur. Though I carried the complete works of Bach and Haydn in my head and could say the cleverest things about them, not a soul would be the better for it. But when I take hold of my mouthpiece and play a lively shimmy, whether the shimmy be good or bad, it will give people pleasure. It gets into their legs and into their blood. That's the point and that alone. Look at the faces in a dance hall at the moment when the music strikes up after a longish pause, how eyes sparkle, legs twitch and faces begin to laugh. That is why one makes music.

Is it not striking that the cost of food and clothing has gone steadily downwards over the past fifty years, while the cost of healthcare and education has gone steadily upwards?

Too often, poverty and deprivation get covered as events. That is, when some disaster strikes, when people die. Yet, poverty is about much more than starvation deaths or near famine conditions. It is the sum total of a multiplicity of factors. The weightage of some of these varies from region to region, society to society, culture to culture. But at the core is a fairly compact number of factors. They include not just income and calorie intake. Land, health, education, literacy, infant mortality rates and life expectancy are also some of them. Debt, assets, irrigation, drinking water, sanitation and jobs count too. You can have the mandatory 2,400 or 2,100 calories a day and yet be very poor. India’s problems differ from those of a Somalia or Ethiopia in crisis. Hunger—again just one aspect of poverty—is far more complex here. It is more low level, less visible and does not make for the dramatic television footage that a Somalia and Ethiopia do. That makes covering the process more challenging—and more important. Many who do not starve receive very inadequate nutrition. Children getting less food than they need can look quite normal. Yet poor nutrition can impair both mental and physical growth and they can suffer its debilitating impact all their lives. A person lacking minimal access to health at critical moments can face destruction almost as surely as one in hunger.

You need to suspend your reaction when you feel like striking back, to listen when you feel like talking back, to ask questions when you feel like telling your opponent the answers, to bridge your differences when you feel like pushing for your way, and to educate when you feel like escalating. Breakthrough

But, on the other hand, the study of music is one of the best ways to learn about human nature. This is why I am so sad about music education being practically nonexistent today in schools. Education means preparing children for adult life; teaching them how to behave and what kinds of human beings they want to be. Everything else is information and can be learned in a very simple way. To play music well you need to strike a balance between your head, your heart, and your stomach. And if one of the three is not there or is there in too strong a dose, you cannot use it. What better way than music to show a child how to be human?

Research highlights a striking link between between encouraging child-raising and class. Half of working-class parents' interactions with their 12-18 month-olds were affirming, versus 80% among the affluent and 20% among those in poverty.

Boys are suffering, in the modern world. They are more disobedient—negatively—or more independent—positively—than girls, and they suffer for this, throughout their pre-university educational career. They are less agreeable (agreeableness being a personality trait associated with compassion, empathy and avoidance of conflict) and less susceptible to anxiety and depression,172 at least after both sexes hit puberty.173 Boys’ interests tilt towards things; girls’ interests tilt towards people.174 Strikingly, these differences, strongly influenced by biological factors, are most pronounced in the Scandinavian societies where gender-equality has been pushed hardest: this is the opposite of what would be expected by those who insist, ever more loudly, that gender is a social construct. It isn’t. This isn’t a debate. The data are in.

Living with the daily ugliness of slum life, educational castration and economic exploitation, some ghetto dwellers now and then strike out in spasms of violence and self-defeating riots. A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard. It is the desperate, suicidal cry of one who is so fed up with the powerlessness of his cave existence that he asserts that he would rather be dead than ignored.

Test-oriented teaching strikes me as anti-educational, a kind of unpleasant game that subverts the real aim of education: to waken a student to her or his potential, and to pursue a subject of considerable importance without restrictions imposed by anything except the inherent demands of the material.

On account of its originality, excellence in every field strikes us as so new and so strange, that to recognize it at first glance will require not only understanding, but also education in the same discipline. As a rule, excellence achieves late recognition, all the later as the discipline is loftier, and those who truly enlighten humankind share the fate of the fixed stars, the light from which requires many years before it descends to the horizon.

My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel—the whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me.

It strikes me that while all this judgment goes on, the options available to women become fewer and fewer. I’m not even (just) talking about the right to choose—across the U.S., women have less access to birth control, health care, reproductive education, and post-partum support. So we give women less information about their bodies and reproduction, less control over their bodies, and less support during and after pregnancy—and then we criticize them fiercely for whatever they end up doing.

Most televangelists, popular Christian preacher icons, and heads of those corporations that we call megachurches share an unreflective modern view of Jesus--that he translates easily and almost automatically into a modern idiom. The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes. Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world. He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise. He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life. He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy. He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of social security, food stamps, welfare, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy), or the welfare state. So far as we know, he expressed no opinion on the ethical issues that plague us today: abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, euthanasia, or bombing Iraq. His world was not ours, his concerns were not ours, and--most striking of all--his beliefs were not ours. Jesus was a first-century Jew, and when we try to make him into a twenty-first century American we distort everything he was and everything he stood for.

One of the penalties of an ecological education, is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." Aldo Leopold (although I would personally strike out 'alone', thankfully)

He utilizes form for a striking lecture; young poets shiver inexperience, but thaw over their own work, fertilize magic.

There is a striking difference between going to school, and getting an education.

He will probably suffer much, make many mistakes, do much injustice and commit many sins. Tell me, my friend, are you educating your son? Is he obedient to you? Do you strike him or punish him?

Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political. This is no doubt the most striking conclusion to emerge from the historical approach I take in this book. In other words, the market and competition, profits and wages, capital and debt, skilled and unskilled workers, natives and aliens, tax havens and competitiveness—none of these things exist as such. All are social and historical constructs, which depend entirely on the legal, fiscal, educational, and political systems that people choose to adopt and the conceptual definitions they choose to work with.

I think modern education over-emphasizes the intellect. I suppose that comes from the scientific trend of the times. You cannot obtain a useful citizen if you only develop his intellect. We take children from their parents because these cannot give them an intellectual training. So far, good. But we fail to give them that training in character which parents alone can give. Home influence, as Grace Aguilar conceived it " where has it gone? It strikes me that this is a grave danger for the future. We are rearing up a brood of crafty egoists, a generation whose earliest recollections are those of getting something for nothing from the State. I am inclined to trace our present social unrest to this over-valuation of the intellect. It hardens the heart and blights all generous impulses. What is going to replace the home, Mr. Keith?

A man is born; his first years go by in obscurity amid the pleasures or hardships of childhood. He grows up; then comes the beginning of manhood; finally society's gates open to welcome him; he comes into contact with his fellows. For the first time he is scrutinized and the seeds of the vices and virtues of his maturity are thought to be observed forming in him. This is, if I am not mistaken, a singular error. Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first word which arouse with him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life.

The goal of this education is to aid the reader in striking a balance between two extremes: cultural anorexia (rejecting all moviegoing because of any negative aspects) and cultural gluttony (consuming too many movies without discretion).

And yet, when we examine matters closely, busy lives turn out to have certain strikingly high incidental costs that we are nevertheless collectively committed to ignoring. Visible success brings us up against the envy and competitiveness of strangers.

This reasoning is based on the wishful thinking that genius can only be earned through education and hard work. It denies the time-proven truth that genius can strike like a random bolt of lightning, at any time in any place, even in a humble glover's home in a small town in Elizabethan England.

David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants. By “giants,” I mean powerful opponents of all kinds—from armies and mighty warriors to disability, misfortune, and oppression. Each chapter tells the story of a different person—famous or unknown, ordinary or brilliant—who has faced an outsize challenge and been forced to respond. Should I play by the rules or follow my own instincts? Shall I persevere or give up? Should I strike back or forgive? Through these stories, I want to explore two ideas. The first is that much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty. And second, that we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness. And the fact of being an underdog can change people in ways that we often fail to appreciate: it can open doors and create opportunities and educate and enlighten and make possible what might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.

There's one big difference between the poor and the rich,' Kite says, taking a drag from his cigarette. We are in a pub, at lunch-time. John Kite is always, unless stated otherwise, smoking a fag, in a pub, at lunch-time. 'The rich aren't evil, as so many of my brothers would tell you. I've known rich people -- I have played on their yachts -- and they are not unkind, or malign, and they do not hate the poor, as many would tell you. And they are not stupid -- or at least, not any more than the poor are. Much as I find amusing the idea of a ruling class of honking toffs, unable to put their socks on without Nanny helping them, it is not true. They build banks, and broker deals, and formulate policy, all with perfect competency. 'No -- the big difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich are blithe. They believe nothing can ever really be so bad, They are born with the lovely, velvety coating of blitheness -- like lanugo, on a baby -- and it is never rubbed off by a bill that can't be paid; a child that can't be educated; a home that must be left for a hostel, when the rent becomes too much. 'Their lives are the same for generations. There is no social upheaval that will really affect them. If you're comfortably middle-class, what's the worst a government policy could do? Ever? Tax you at 90 per cent and leave your bins, unemptied, on the pavement. But you and everyone you know will continue to drink wine -- but maybe cheaper -- go on holiday -- but somewhere nearer -- and pay off your mortgage -- although maybe later. 'Consider, now, then, the poor. What's the worst a government policy can do to them? It can cancel their operation, with no recourse to private care. It can run down their school -- with no escape route to a prep. It can have you out of your house and into a B&B by the end of the year. When the middle-classes get passionate about politics, they're arguing about their treats -- their tax breaks and their investments. When the poor get passionate about politics, they're fighting for their lives. 'Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, and animalistic. No classical music for us -- no walking around National Trust properties, or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful; dying in mines, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate, then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor -- that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better, later. We live now -- for our instant, hot, fast treats, to prep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio. 'You must never, never forget, when you talk to someone poor, that it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad postcode, It's a miracle when someone from a bad postcode gets anywhere, son. A miracle they do anything at all.

To teach a nation the handling of arms is to give it a virile education. If the Romans had not recruited Germans in their armies, the latter would never have had the opportunity of becoming soldiers and, eventually, of annihilating their former instructors. The most striking example is that of Arminius, who became Commander of the Third Roman Legion. The Romans instructed the Third in the arts of war, and Arminius afterwards used it to defeat his instructors. At the time of the revolt against Rome, the most daring of Arminius' brothers-in-arms were all Germanics who had served some time or other in the Roman legions.

Even after more than ten years as a suicide prevention activist, I still find those numbers—and the general public’s ignorance about them—staggering. I taught Dylan, as I had taught his brother before him, to protect himself from lightning strikes, snakebites, and hypothermia. I taught him to floss, to wear sunscreen, and the importance of checking his blind spot twice. As he became a teenager, I talked as openly as I could about the dangers of drinking and drug use, and I educated him about safe and ethical sexual behavior. It never crossed my mind that the gravest danger Dylan faced would not come from an external source at all, but from within himself. In

One boy, still aching from his battle the day before and newly educated in the mysteries of sex. One boy, now looking twelve instead of fourteen, his lashes dusting down thick upon his cheeks, the lids shuttering those extraordinary blue eyes; one boy with his hand loosely cupping a whore's breast, his hawk-scarred wrist lying tanned upon the counterpane. One boy in the final instants of his life's last good sleep, one boy who will shortly be in motion, who will be falling as a dislodged pebble falls on a steep and broken slope of scree; a falling pebble that strikes another, and another, and another, those pebbles striking yet more, until the whole slope is in motion and the earth shakes with the sound of the landslide.

remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.

They could take a religion apart and show how it ticked, but they couldn’t put it back together so it would work for anybody. I mildly suggested that the day was past, maybe, when religion could work for any educated person. She flared a bit; said religion still worked for a hell of a lot of people. She said her parents would never have survived the death of Seth without it, and that she didn’t know whether she and Milton could have stayed in one piece after the baby died if they hadn’t had their religion. At this point I was probing, perhaps cruelly, to strike bottom. I said, “Well, Margie, maybe that only proves the power of a dream.” Like a flash she answered—and her voice sounded just as it did in the old days, full of life and sparkle, “Who isn’t dreaming, Wally? You?” The fireworks started around then, all green and golden and red, over the sound.

To understand anti-Semitism within Germany’s Gentile majority, one has to talk about the skills, educational fervor, and rapid social rise of striking numbers of German Jews. Only then will the contrast emerge between them and the relatively lethargic German majority, revealing why anti-Semitism could gain so large a foothold in German society. Only then can we see anti-Semites as people motivated in large part by jealousy and resentment.

Fortunately, new platforms and technology have made homeschooling manageable on many fronts. Parents can do everything from accessing first-rate courses online to finding support from other parents in the same situation. The best part is that they can completely tailor the experience to the learning style and interest of their children and give them the attention that they would never get in the classroom. The results are striking. Twenty-five percent of homeschooled children are at least one grade ahead of their traditionally schooled peers. The homeschooled population, as a whole, scores exceptionally higher on academic achievement tests.5 This shift is perhaps the best glimpse of the future of education—mass customization alongside personalized attention. Like banking, it will return to a human-scale model based on relationships and personal needs, and it will be where much of the disruption in the economy and labor market occurs in the next few decades.

The persistence of the [whole language] ideas despite the mass of evidence against them is most striking at this point. In normal science, a theory whose assumptions and predictions have been repeatedly contradicted by data will be discarded. That is what happened to the Smith and Goodman theories within reading science, but in education they are theoretical zombies that cannot be stopped by conventional weapons such as empirical disconfirmation, leaving them free to roam the educational landscape.

In the notorious passage in 1 Timothy 2 where Paul prohibits women from teaching, I think it’s quite striking that he also discusses how she should learn. Everyone gets wound up in a snarl about the fact that she should learn “in silence,” but what they fail to notice is that she’s learning. Paul is assuming that women are to be students of the Word, and there’s never a hint that it’s more important for the men to be educated in the faith than the women. Women are prohibited from preaching theology, but it’s never assumed that they shouldn’t know theology.

The six-hundred-page Encyclopedia of Jihad is also widely available online and includes chapters such as “How to Kill,” “Explosive Devices,” “Manufacturing Detonators,” and “Assassination with Mines.” In a striking example of how dangerous such online education can be, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the terrorist suspect arrested for his role in the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, admitted to authorities he and his brother learned how to make the pressure-cooker bomb used in the attack after reading step-by-step instructions published in al-Qaeda’s online magazine, Inspire, in an article titled “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.

[Today's high schoolers are required to read] a couple of Shakespeare plays...the couple of Shakespeare plays function as an inoculation – that is, you get exposed to 'half-dead Shakespeare virus', and it keeps you from ever loving Shakespeare again, your whole life long. It would be much better if they didn't do that at all! Because [the students] have no linguistic preparation for it, and no cultural or historical preparation for it. They've not been reading English poetry, so the language strikes them as completely bizarre […] and they have no historical place to put it, so they don't know what's going on. All they know is that they're 'supposed to like it'.

I have spoken of reinventing marriage, of marriages achieving their rebirth in the middle age of the partners. This phenomenon has been called the 'comedy of remarriage' by Stanley Cavell, whose Pursuits of Happiness, a film book, is perhaps the best marriage manual ever published. One must, however, translate his formulation from the language of Hollywood, in which he developed it, into the language of middle age: less glamour, less supple youth, less fantasyland. Cavell writes specifically of Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s in which couples -- one partner is often the dazzling Cary Grant -- learn to value each other, to educate themselves in equality, to remarry. Cavell recognizes that the actresses in these movie -- often the dazzling Katherine Hepburn -- are what made them possible. If read not as an account of beautiful people in hilarious situations, but as a deeply philosophical discussion of marriage, his book contains what are almost aphorisms of marital achievement. For example: ....'[The romance of remarriage] poses a structure in which we are permanently in doubt who the hero is, that is, whether it is the male or female who is the active partner, which of them is in quest, who is following whom.' Cary grant & Katherine Hepburn "Above all, despite the sexual attractiveness of the actors in the movies he discusses, Cavell knows that sexuality is not the ultimate secret in these marriage: 'in God's intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage. Here is the reason that these relationships strike us as having the quality of friendship, a further factor in their exhilaration for us.' "He is wise enough, moreover, to emphasize 'the mystery of marriage by finding that neither law nor sexuality (nor, by implication, progeny) is sufficient to ensure true marriage and suggesting that what provides legitimacy is the mutual willingness for remarriage, for a sort of continuous affirmation. Remarriage, hence marriage, is, whatever else it is, an intellectual undertaking.

When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing “God Bless America.” No, no, no. Not God bless America! God damn America!

If Shakespeare be considered as a MAN born in a rude age and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction either from the world or from books, he may be regarded as a prodigy; if represented as a POET capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined or intelligent audience, we must abate much of this eulogy. In his compositions, we regret that many irregularities, and even absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionated scenes intermixed with them; and, at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties on account of their being surrounded by such deformities. A striking peculiarity of sentiment, adapted to a single character, he frequently hits, as it were, by inspiration; but a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold. Nervous and picturesque expressions as well as descriptions abound in him; but it is in vain we look either for purity or simplicity of diction. His total ignorance of all theatrical art and conduct, however material a defect, yet, as it affects the spectator rather than the reader, we can more easily excuse than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way only by intervals to the irradiations of genius. [....] And there may even remain a suspicion that we overrate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic on account of their being disproportioned and misshapen.

Strikes me that one-half or maybe two-thirds of the American people are the best fellows on earth--the friendliest and the most interested in everything and the jolliest. And I guess the remaining third are just about the worst crabs, the worst Meddlesome Matties, the most ignorant and pretentious fools, that God ever made. Male AND female! I'd be tickled to death to live in America IF. If we got rid of Prohibition, so a man could get a glass of beer instead of being compelled to drink gin and hootch. If we got rid of taking seriously a lot of self-advertising, half-educated preachers and editors and politicians, so that folks would develop a little real thinking instead of being pushed along by a lot of mental and moral policemen.

I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.” I don’t know what happened the day after

We’re going on strike,” I announced. “And we’re not coming back inside until Joey Harrington is suspended. I don’t know what else because I’m too angry to think!” Mr. Feinman stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Huh.” He looked at the other students. “Is that what you all want?” “Man!” Clyde exclaimed, shaking his head. “I’ve got some demands, all right.” “Are we going to get in trouble for missing class?” asked Samantha Klinger, one of the gamers who kept pink streaks in her hair. Mr. Feinman shrugged. “I’d say yes. The real question is what if you win?” “We need an anti-bully committee,” said Bryce Smith, a theater kid with thick glasses. “Made up of students and teachers so bullies have to answer to someone other than the principal. So there’s no favorites.” The class murmured an agreement. The students behind me seconded the motion. “So go,” Mr. Feinman said. “Go and fight for your education, then.

In Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, there is a passage that gets close to the core of what a literary education should be about. The passage offers a deep sense of what we can ask from a consequential book. Proust speaks with the kind of clarity that is peculiarly his about what he hopes his work will achieve. In particular, he reflects on the relation he wants to strike with his readers. "It seemed to me," he observes, "that they would not be 'my' readers but readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers—it would be my book but with it I would furnish them the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I would not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me whether 'it really is like that.' I should ask whether the words that they read within themselves are the same as those which I have written.

Take students today They are in some ways freer than they were 60 years ago in their attitudes and commitments and so on. On the other hand they are more disciplined. They are disciplined by debt. Part of the reasoning for arranging education so you come out with heavy debt is so you are disciplined. Take the last 20 years—the neo-liberal years roughly—a very striking part of what is called "globalization" is just aimed at discipline. It wants to eliminate freedom of choice and impose discipline. How do you do that? Well, if you're a couple in the U.S. now, each working 50 hours a week to put food on the table, you don't have time to think about how to become a libertarian socialist. When what you are worried about is "how can I get food on the table?" or "I've got kids to take care of, and when they are sick I've got to go to work and what's going to happen to them?" Those are very well-designed techniques of imposing discipline.

The discords of our experience--delight in change, fear of change; the death of the individual and the survival of the species, the pains and pleasures of love, the knowledge of light and dark, the extinction and the perpetuity of empires--these were Spenser's subject; and they could not be treated without this third thing, a kind of time between time and eternity. He does not make it easy to extract philosophical notions from his text; but that he is concerned with the time-defeating aevum and uses it as a concord-fiction, I have no doubt. 'The seeds of knowledge,' as Descartes observed, 'are within us like fire in flint; philosophers educe them by reason, but the poets strike them forth by imagination, and they shine the more clearly.' We leave behind the philosophical statements, with their pursuit of logical consequences and distinctions, for a free, self-delighting inventiveness, a new imagining of the problems. Spenser used something like the Augustinian seminal reasons; he was probably not concerned about later arguments against them, finer discriminations. He does not tackle the questions, in the Garden cantos, of concreation, but carelessly--from a philosophical point of view--gives matter chronological priority. The point that creation necessitates mutability he may have found in Augustine, or merely noticed for himself, without wondering how it could be both that and a consequence of the Fall; it was an essential feature of one's experience of the world, and so were all the arguments, precise or not, about it. Now one of the differences between doing philosophy and writing poetry is that in the former activity you defeat your object if you imitate the confusion inherent in an unsystematic view of your subject, whereas in the second you must in some measure imitate what is extreme and scattering bright, or else lose touch with that feeling of bright confusion. Thus the schoolmen struggled, when they discussed God, for a pure idea of simplicity, which became for them a very complex but still rational issue: for example, an angel is less simple than God but simpler than man, because a species is less simple than pure being but simpler than an individual. But when a poet discusses such matters, as in say 'Air and Angels,' he is making some human point, in fact he is making something which is, rather than discusses, an angel--something simple that grows subtle in the hands of commentators. This is why we cannot say the Garden of Adonis is wrong as the Faculty of Paris could say the Averroists were wrong. And Donne's conclusion is more a joke about women than a truth about angels. Spenser, though his understanding of the expression was doubtless inferior to that of St. Thomas, made in the Garden stanzas something 'more simple' than any section of the Summa. It was also more sensuous and more passionate. Milton used the word in his formula as Aquinas used it of angels; poetry is more simple, and accordingly more difficult to talk about, even though there are in poetry ideas which may be labelled 'philosophical.

Suppose someone—say Mr. Henry Ford—finds out a way of making motor-cars so cheaply that no one else can compete, with the result that all the other firms engaged in making cars go bankrupt. In order to arrive at the cost to the community of one of the new cheap cars, one must add, to what Mr. Ford would have to pay, the proper proportion of all the now useless plant belonging to other firms, and of the cost of rearing and educating those workers and managers previously employed by other firms but now out of work. (Some will obtain employment with Mr. Ford, but probably not all, since the new process is cheaper, and therefore requires less labour.) There may well also be other expenses to the community —labour disputes, strikes, riots, extra police, trials and imprisonments. When all these items are taken into account, it may well be found that the cost of the new cars to the community is, at first, considerably greater than that of the old ones. Now it is the cost to the community which determines what is socially advantageous, while it is the cost to the individual manufacturer which determines, in our system, what takes place.

Serious” film strikes me as absurd. It’s bowdlerized life. Filmic drama asks me to care about loves, losses, supposed triumphs—things that together amount to the chiseled dash connecting my birth to my death on my tombstone. To me, the modern horror film has more to do with first-world existence as it is lived today. In the modern horror film, we no longer come together to defeat an existential threat, gaining knowledge of and confidence in ourselves along the way. Altruism is not rewarded. Even the most self-sacrificing character will be killed off, often for laughs. One protagonist, if any, makes it out alive by becoming more brutal than the monster. He trades debasement for survival, which is short-lived—because of course the monster comes back, for the lucrative sequels. In horror, characters are stripped of everything they think they know and believe they are. Education and privilege mean nothing. Security is a delusion; today is the last day of the rest of your life. You, what makes you you, your blemishes and singular characteristics, will disappear in an instant. Stalking everything you do is death, and all that matters is how furiously you go out.

Vague assertions as to the equality of the sexes and the similarity of their duties are only empty words; they are no answer to my argument. It is a poor sort of logic to quote isolated exceptions against laws so firmly established. Women, you say, are not always bearing children. Granted; yet that is their proper business. Because there are a hundred or so of large towns in the world where women live licentiously and have few children, will you maintain that it is their business to have few children? And what would become of your towns if the remote country districts, with their simpler and purer women, did not make up for the barrenness of your fine ladies? There are plenty of country places where women with only four or five children are reckoned unfruitful. In conclusion, although here and there a woman may have few children, what difference does it make? Is it any the less a woman's business to be a mother? And do not the general laws of nature and morality make provision for this state of things? Even if there were these long intervals, which you assume, between the periods of pregnancy, can a woman suddenly change her way of life without danger? Can she be a nursing mother to-day and a soldier tomorrow? Will she change her tastes and her feelings as a chameleon changes his color? Will she pass at once from the privacy of household duties and indoor occupations to the buffeting of the winds, the toils, the labors, the perils of war? Will she be now timid, now brave, now fragile, now robust? If the young men of Paris find a soldier's life too hard for them, how would a woman put up with it, a woman who has hardly ventured out of doors without a parasol and who has scarcely put a foot to the ground? Will she make a good soldier at an age when even men are retiring from this arduous business? There are countries, I grant you, where women bear and rear children with little or no difficulty, but in those lands the men go half-naked in all weathers, they strike down the wild beasts, they carry a canoe as easily as a knapsack, they pursue the chase for 700 or 800 leagues, they sleep in the open on the bare ground, they bear incredible fatigues and go many days without food. When women become strong, men become still stronger; when men become soft, women become softer; change both the terms and the ratio remains unaltered.

Cooking’s a more popular hobby than fencing.” “They don’t have a Great British Fence-Off,” muttered Dante. There was a thoughtful pause. “Oh, that sounds like such a good show,” Nicholas murmured. “I like your idea for a television show as well,” Seiji told Dante. “Why do you picture it being British specifically?” Dante’s mouth opened and closed. No sound came out. “Could be because of the European history of dueling?” Nicholas suggested, and looked to Seiji. “Like in the book you let me borrow. Did you know that if you killed someone in a duel back in the old days, you could run away to France, because in France, dueling was still a totally cool and legal way to kill someone you had beef with?” Seiji nodded, pointing at Nicholas for emphasis. “I did know that, but clearly not everybody does. You’re right; the show would be educational for many people. Perhaps they could hold fencing displays in old manor houses and castles and châteaux? And, of course, in colleges such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Trinity, where the legacy of fencing students is so illustrious.” Breakfast conversation was so awesome now that Seiji had joined them! Nicholas bet nobody else had as much fun as they did. Dante had clearly given up on talking and was giving Bobby a silent, pleading look. Nicholas guessed Dante was shy. Seiji was pretty famous, so maybe Dante was overwhelmed.

Let me return from history and draw my conclusion. What all this means to us at the present time is this: Our system has already passed its flowering. Some time ago it reached that summit of blessedness which the mysterious game of world history sometimes allows to things beautiful and desirable in themselves. We are on the downward slope. Our course may possible stretch out for a very long time, but in any case nothing finer, ore beautiful, and more desirable than what we have already had can henceforth be expected. The road leads downhill. Historically we are, I believe, ripe for dismantling. And there is no doubt that such will be our fate, not today or tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow. I do not draw this conclusion from any excessively moralistic estimate of our accomplishments and our abilities: I draw it far more from the movements which I see already on the way in the outside world. Critical times are approaching; the omens can be sensed everywhere; the world is once again about to shift its center of gravity. Displacements of power are in the offing. They will not take place without war and violence. From the Far East comes a threat not only to peace, but to life and liberty. Even if our country remains politically neutral, even if our whole nation unanimously abides by tradition (which is not the case) and attempts to remain faithful to Castalian ideals, that will be in vain. Some of our representatives in Parliament are already saying that Castalia is a rather expensive luxury for our country. The country may very soon be forced into a serious rearmament - armaments for defensive purposes only, of course - and great economies will be necessary. In spite of the government's benevolent disposition towards us, much of the economizing will strike us directly. We are proud that our Order and the cultural continuity it provides have cost the country as little as they have. In comparison with other ages, especially the early period of the Feuilletonistic Age with its lavishly endowed universities, its innumerable consultants and opulent institutes, this toll is really not large. It is infinitesimal compared with the sums consumed for war and armaments during the Century of Wars. But before too long this kind of armament may once again be the supreme necessity; the generals will again dominate Parliament; and if the people are confronted with the choice of sacrificing Castalia or exposing themselves to the danger of war and destruction, we know how they will choose. Undoubtedly a bellicose ideology will burgeon. The rash of propaganda will affect youth in particular. Then scholars and scholarship, Latin and mathematics, education and culture, will be considered worth their salt only to the extent that they can serve the ends of war.

The American dinner-table, in truth, becomes a monument to the defective technic of the American housewife. The guest who respects his oesophagus, invited to feed upon its discordant and ill-prepared victuals, evades the experience as long and as often as he can, and resigns himself to it as he might resign himself to being shaved by a paralytic. Nowhere else in the world have women more leisure and freedom to improve their minds, and nowhere else do they show a higher level of intelligence, or take part more effectively in affairs of the first importance. But nowhere else is there worse cooking in the home, or a more inept handling of the whole domestic economy, or a larger dependence upon the aid of external substitutes, by men provided, for the skill that is wanting where it theoretically exists. It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready-made. And nowhere else is there more striking tendency to throw the whole business of training the minds of children upon professional teachers, and the whole business of instructing them in morals and religion upon so-called Sunday-schools, and the whole business of developing and caring for their bodies upon playground experts, sex hygienists and other such professionals, most of them mountebanks.

The other strikingly modern feature of the type of poet which Euripides now introduced into the history of literature is his apparently voluntary refusal to take any part whatever in public life. Euripides was not a soldier as Aeschylus was, nor a priestly dignitary as Sophocles was, but, on the other hand, he is the very first poet who is reported to have possessed a library, and he appears to be also the first poet to lead the life of a scholar in complete retirement from the world. If the bust of him, with its tousled hair, its tired eyes and the embittered lines round the mouth, is a true portrait, and if we are right in seeing in it a discrepancy between body and spirit, and the expression of a restless and dissatisfied life, then we may say that Euripides was the first unhappy poet, the first whose poetry brought him suffering. The notion of genius in the modern sense is not merely completely strange to the ancient world; its poets and artists have nothing of the genius about them. The rational and craftsmanlike elements in art are far more important for them than the irrational and intuitive. Plato’s doctrine of enthusiasm emphasized, indeed, that poets owed their work to divine inspiration and not to mere technical ability, but this idea by no means leads to the exaltation of the poet; it only increases the gulf between him and his work, and makes of him a mere instrument of the divine purpose. It is, however, of the essence of the modern notion of genius that there is no gulf between the artist and his work, or, if such a gulf is admitted, that the genius is far greater than any of his works and can never be adequately expressed in them. So genius connotes for us a tragic loneliness and inability to make itself fully understood. But the ancient world knows nothing of this or of the other tragic feature of the modern artist—his lack of recognition by his own contemporaries and his despairing appeals to a remote posterity. There is not a trace of all this—at least before Euripides. Euripides’ lack of success was mainly due to the fact that there was nothing in classical times that could be called an educated middle class. The old aristocracy took no pleasure in his plays, owing to their different outlook on life, and the new bourgeois public could not enjoy them either, owing to its lack of education. With his philosophical radicalism, Euripides is a unique pheno menon, even among the poets of his age, for these are in general as conservative in their outlook as were those of the classical age —in spite of a naturalism of style which was derived from the urban and commercial society they lived in, and which had reached a point at which it was really incompatible with political conservatism. As politicians and partisans these poets hold to their conservative doctrines, but as artists they are swept along in the progressive stream of their times. This inner contradiction in their work is a completely new phenomenon in the social history of art.

Hoover fed the story to sympathetic reporters—so-called friends of the bureau. One article about the case, which was syndicated by William Randolph Hearst’s company, blared, NEVER TOLD BEFORE! —How the Government with the Most Gigantic Fingerprint System on Earth Fights Crime with Unheard-of Science Refinements; Revealing How Clever Sleuths Ended a Reign of Murder and Terror in the Lonely Hills of the Osage Indian Country, and Then Rounded Up the Nation’s Most Desperate Gang In 1932, the bureau began working with the radio program The Lucky Strike Hour to dramatize its cases. One of the first episodes was based on the murders of the Osage. At Hoover’s request, Agent Burger had even written up fictional scenes, which were shared with the program’s producers. In one of these scenes, Ramsey shows Ernest Burkhart the gun he plans to use to kill Roan, saying, “Look at her, ain’t she a dandy?” The broadcasted radio program concluded, “So another story ends and the moral is identical with that set forth in all the others of this series….[ The criminal] was no match for the Federal Agent of Washington in a battle of wits.” Though Hoover privately commended White and his men for capturing Hale and his gang and gave the agents a slight pay increase—“ a small way at least to recognize their efficiency and application to duty”—he never mentioned them by name as he promoted the case. They did not quite fit the profile of college-educated recruits that became part of Hoover’s mythology. Plus, Hoover never wanted his men to overshadow him.

According to Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project, for example, one’s “cultural worldview”—that would be political leanings or ideological outlook to the rest of us—explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”16 More powerfully, that is, than age, ethnicity, education, or party affiliation. The Yale researchers explain that people with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.17 The evidence is striking. Among the segment of the U.S. population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,” compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the strongest “egalitarian” views.18 Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes the tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition,” the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways that will protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion.19 As Kahan explained in Nature, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today. Furthermore, leftists are equally capable of denying inconvenient scientific evidence. If conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from corporations and government. This can lapse into the kind of fact resistance we see among those who are convinced that multinational drug companies have covered up the link between childhood vaccines and autism. No matter what evidence is marshaled to disprove their theories, it doesn’t matter to these crusaders—it’s just the system covering up for itself.20 This kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity that surrounds the climate issue today. As

In June 1981, a strike shuttered the major leagues for fifty days, the first time in baseball history that players walked out during the season. Determined to make his people earn their keep, George Steinbrenner ordered his major-league coaches into the minors to scout and help mentor the organization’s prospects. Berra drew Nashville, where Merrill was the manager. Merrill was a former minor-league catcher with a degree in physical education from the University of Maine. He began working for the Yankees in 1978 at West Haven, Connecticut, in the Eastern League and moved south when the Yankees took control of the Southern League’s Nashville team in 1980. Suddenly, in mid-1981, the former catcher who had never made it out of Double-A ball had the most famous and decorated Yankees backstop asking him, “What do you want me to do?” Wait a minute, Merrill thought. Yogi Berra is asking me to supervise him? “Do whatever you want,” Merrill said. “No,” Berra said. “Give me something specific.” And that was when Merrill began to understand the existential splendor of Yogi Berra, whom he would come to call Lawrence or Sir Lawrence in comic tribute to his utter lack of pretense and sense of importance. “He rode buses with us all night,” Merrill said. “You think he had to do that? He was incredible.” One day Merrill told him, “Why don’t you hit some rollers to that lefty kid over there at first base?” Berra did as he was told and later remarked to Merrill, “That kid looks pretty good with the glove.” Berra knew a prospect when he saw one. It was Don Mattingly, who at the time was considered expendable by a chronically shortsighted organization always on the prowl for immediate assistance at the major-league level.

Zap. Sports channel. Normal is nine innings, four balls, three strikes, somebody wins, somebody loses, there’s no such thing as a tie. Zap. Normal is unreal people, mostly rich unreal people, having sex with rappers and basketball players and thinking of their unreal family as a real-world brand, like Pepsi or Drano or Ford. Zap. News channels. Normal is guns and the normal America that really wants to be great again. Then there’s another normal if your skin color is the wrong color and another if you’re educated and another if you think education is brainwashing and there’s an America that believes in vaccines for kids and another that says that’s a con trick and everything one normal believes is a lie to another normal and they’re all on TV depending where you look, so, yeah, it’s confusing. I’m really trying to understand which this is America now. Zap zap zap. A man with his head in a bag being shot by a man without a shirt on. A fat man in a red hat screaming at men and women also fat also in red hats about victory, We’re undereducated and overfed. We’re full of pride over who the f*ck knows. We drive to the emergency room and send Granny to get our guns and cigarettes. We don’t need no stinkin’ allies cause we’re stupid and you can suck our dicks. We are Beavis and Butt-Head on ’roids. We drink Roundup from the can. Our president looks like a Christmas ham and talks like Chucky. We’re America, bitch. Zap. Immigrants raping our women every day. We need Space Force because Space ISIS. Zap. Normal is Upside-Down Land. Our old friends are our enemies now and our old enemy is our pal. Zap, zap. Men and men, women and women in love. The purple mountains’ majesty. A man with an oil painting of himself with Jesus hanging in his living room. Dead schoolkids. Hurricanes. Beauty. Lies. Zap, zap, zap. “Normal doesn’t feel so normal to me,” I tell him. “It’s normal to feel that way,” he replies.

There are kinds of food we’re hard wired to love. Salt, sugars, and fats. Food that, over the course of the history of our species, has helped us get through some long winters, and plow through some extreme migrations. There are also certain kinds of information we’re hard wired to love: affirmation is something we all enjoy receiving, and the confirmation of our beliefs helps us form stronger communities. The spread of fear and its companion, hate, are clearly survival instincts, but more benign acts like gossip also help us spread the word about things that could be a danger to us. In the world of food, we’ve seen massive efficiencies leveraged by massive corporations that have driven the cost of a calorie down so low that now obesity is more of a threat than famine. Those same kinds of efficiencies are now transforming our information supply: we’ve learned how to produce and distribute information in a nearly free manner. The parallels between what’s happened to our food and what’s happened to our information are striking. Driven by a desire for more profits, and a desire to feed more people, manufacturers figured out how to make food really cheap; and the stuff that’s the worst for us tends to be the cheapest to make. As a result, a healthy diet — knowing what to consume and what to avoid — has gone from being a luxury to mandatory for our longevity. Just as food companies learned that if they want to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar — the stuff that people crave — media companies learned that affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right? Because of the inherent social nature of information, the consequences of these new efficiencies are far more dramatic than even the consequence of physical obesity. Our information habits go beyond affecting the individual. They have serious social consequences. Much as a poor diet gives us a variety of diseases, poor information diets give us new forms of ignorance — ignorance that comes not from a lack of information, but from overconsumption of it, and sicknesses and delusions that don’t affect the underinformed but the hyperinformed and the well educated.

I think that's quite true. and in fact the people who understand this the best are those who are carrying out the control and domination in the more free societies. like the U.S. and England, where popular struggles have have won a lot of freedoms over the years and the state has limited capacity to coerce. It is very striking that it's precisely in those societies that elite groups—the business world, state managers and so on—recognized early on that they are going to have to develop massive methods of control of attitude and opinion, because you cannot control people by force anymore and therefore you have to modify their consciousness so that they don't perceive that they are living under conditions of alienation, oppression, subordination and so on. In fact, that's what probably a couple trillion dollars are spent on each year in the U.S., very self-consciously, from the framing of television advertisements for two-year olds to what you are taught in graduate school economics programs. It's designed to create a consciousness of subordination and it's also intended specifically and pretty consciously to suppress normal human emotions. Normal human emotions are sympathy and solidarity, not just for people but for stranded dolphins. It's just a normal reaction for people. If you go back to the classical political economists, people like Adam Smith, this was just taken for granted as the core of human nature and society. One of the main concentrations of advertising and education is to drive that out of your mind. And it's very conscious. In fact, it's conscious in social policy right in front of our eyes today. Take the effort to destroy Social Security. Well, what's the point of that? There's a lot of scam about financial problems, which is all total nonsense. And, of course, they want Wall Street to make a killing. Underlying it all is something much deeper. Social Security is based on a human emotion and it's a natural human emotion which has to be driven out of people minds, namely the emotion that you care about other people. You care. It's a social and community responsibility to care whether a disabled widow across town has enough food to eat, or whether a kid across the street can go to school. You have to get that out of people's heads. You have to make them say, "Look, you are a personal, rational wealth maximizer. If that disabled widow didn't prepare for her own future, it's her problem not your problem. It's not your fault she doesn't have enough to eat so why should you care?

Around the world, people who studied parenting usually divided the various styles into four basic categories: Authoritarian parents were strict disciplinarians, the “because I said so” parents. Permissive parents tended to be indulgent and averse to conflict. They acted more like friends than parents. In some studies, permissive parents tended to be wealthier and more educated than other parents. Neglectful parents were just how they sounded: emotionally distant and often absent. They were also more likely to live in poverty. Then there was the fourth option: Authoritative. The word was like a mash up of authoritarian and permissive. These parents inhabited the sweet spot between the two: they were warm, responsive, and close to their kids, but, as their children got older, they gave them freedom to explore and to fail and to make their own choices. Throughout their kids’ upbringing, authoritative parents also had clear, bright limits, rules they did not negotiate. “We’re socialized to believe that warmth and strictness are opposites,” Doug Lemov writes in his book Teach Like a Champion. “The fact is, the degree to which you are warm has no bearing on the degree to which you are strict, and vice versa.” Parents and teachers who manage to be both warm and strict seem to strike a resonance with children, gaining their trust along with their respect. When researcher Jelani Mandara at Northwestern University studied 4,754 U.S. teenagers and their parents, he found that kids with authoritative parents had higher academic achievement levels, fewer symptoms of depression, and fewer problems with aggression, disobedience, and other antisocial behaviors. Other studies have found similar benefits. Authoritative parents trained their kids to be resilient, and it seemed to work.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Aldo Leopold (although, I personally would strike 'alone') mm

All we believe is the roads, the bridges, the railways, the electricity they build only on televisions. I always ask my self these questions: 1. Where are the roads? ✏The Abuja - Lokoja road was awarded by Obasanjo's administration. He spent 8 years in the office. Then Yaradua and Goodluck spent another 4 years. Now if Goodluck is elected, he will be spending another 8 years. This will amount to 20 years and 180 km road is yet to be completed. ✏Enugu - Onitsha road was also awarded by the Obasanjo administration and till date, a journey that is supposed to take 45 minutes can take you 8 hours if it rains. ✏Enugu- PH road is on the same series. ✏What about Uyo - Calabar route? Just to mention a few. 2. Where is the power? They sold all the NEPA to their friends. We pay for the light that was not supplied. 3. Our education and health system go bad everyday. Lecturers and Health workers spent more time at home than in the schools and hospitals as a result of incessant strikes. 4. The government failed to provide us with security. People are being killed everyday and yet government comes out to tell us they are in control. 5. Why are we pretending that all is well? It is only in Nigeria where monies develop wings and fly. $20 billion oil money disappeared and they said it was $10 billion. Forensic investigators were hired and that was the end of the story. N20 billion pension fund stolen and nothing came out of it. $9.3 million seized in South Africa and government claimed it was meant for ammunition purchase. The immigration scandal has also been swept under the carpet because the senate could not proceed with their investigation. The man behind the contract is sitting among the high seats in the senate. Innocent people were defrauded and they at the same time lost their lives yet, we have a transparent governance. 6. Why are we praising government as if they are doing whatever with their personal money. How many people in their various communities have they provided scholarship with their personal money before they got elected? The reason they got elected is to manage our resources and not to loot us dry. One thing I know is that we will not have any meaningful development except if we make a CHANGE.

Why are They Converting to Islam? - Op-Eds - Arutz Sheva One of the things that worries the West is the fact that hundreds and maybe even thousands of young Europeans are converting to Islam, and some of them are joining terror groups and ISIS and returning to promote Jihad against the society in which they were born, raised and educated. The security problem posed by these young people is a serious one, because if they hide their cultural identity, it is extremely difficult for Western security forces to identify them and their evil intentions. This article will attempt to clarify the reasons that impel these young people to convert to Islam and join terrorist organizations. The sources for this article are recordings made by the converts themselves, and the words they used, written here, are for the most part unedited direct quotations. Muslim migration to Europe, America and Australia gain added significance in that young people born in these countries are exposed to Islam as an alternative to the culture in which they were raised. Many of the converts are convinced that Islam is a religion of peace, love, affection and friendship, based on the generous hospitality and warm welcome they receive from the Moslem friends in their new social milieu. In many instances, a young person born into an individualistic, cold and alienating society finds that Muslim society provides  – at college, university or  community center – a warm embrace, a good word, encouragement and help, things that are lacking in the society from which he stems. The phenomenon is most striking in the case of those who grew up in dysfunctional families or divorced homes, whose parents are alcoholics, drug addicts, violent and abusive, or parents who take advantage of their offspring and did not give their children a suitable emotional framework and model for building a normative, productive life. The convert sees his step as a mature one based on the right of an individual to determine his own religious and cultural identity, even if the family and society he is abandoning disagree. Sometimes converting to Islam is a form of parental rebellion. Often, the convert is spurned by his family and surrounding society for his decision, but the hostility felt towards Islam by his former environment actually results in his having more confidence in the need for his conversion. Anything said against conversion to Islam is interpreted as unjustified racism and baseless Islamophobia. The Islamic convert is told by Muslims that Islam respects the prophets of its mother religions, Judaism and Christianity, is in favor of faith in He Who dwells on High, believes in the Day of Judgment, in reward and punishment, good deeds and avoiding evil. He is convinced that Islam is a legitimate religion as valid as Judaism and Christianity, so if his parents are Jewish or Christian, why can't he become Muslim? He sees a good many positive and productive Muslims who benefit their society and its economy, who have integrated into the environment in which he was raised, so why not emulate them? Most Muslims are not terrorists, so neither he nor anyone should find his joining them in the least problematic. Converts to Islam report that reading the Koran and uttering the prayers add a spiritual meaning to their lives after years of intellectual stagnation, spiritual vacuum and sinking into a materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle. They describe the switch to Islam in terms of waking up from a bad dream, as if it is a rite of passage from their inane teenage years. Their feeling is that the Islamic religion has put order into their lives, granted them a measuring stick to assess themselves and their behavior, and defined which actions are allowed and which are forbidden, as opposed to their "former" society, which couldn't or wouldn't lay down rules. They are willing to accept the limitations Islamic law places on Muslims, thereby "putting order into their lives" after "a life of in

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase. The rapid increase in college

April 20 Can a Saint Slander God? For all the promises of God in Him are yea, and in Him Amen. 2 Corinthians 1:20 Jesus told the parable of the talents recorded in Matthew 25 as a warning that it is possible for us to misjudge our capacity. This parable has not to do with natural gifts, but with the Pentecostal gift of the Holy Ghost. We must not measure our spiritual capacity by education or by intellect; our capacity in spiritual things is measured by the promises of God. If we get less than God wants us to have, before long we will slander Him as the servant slandered his master: “You expect more than You give me power to do; You demand too much of me, I cannot stand true to You where I am placed.” When it is a question of God’s Almighty Spirit, never say “I can’t.” Never let the limitation of natural ability come in. If we have received the Holy Spirit, God expects the work of the Holy Spirit to be manifested in us. The servant justified himself in everything he did and condemned his lord on every point—“Your demand is out of all proportion to what you give.” Have we been slandering God by daring to worry when He has said: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you”? Worrying means exactly what this servant implied—“I know You mean to leave me in the lurch.” The person who is lazy naturally is always captious—“I haven’t had a decent chance,” and the one who is lazy spiritually is captious with God. Lazy people always strike out on an independent line. Never forget that our capacity in spiritual matters is measured by the promises of God. Is God able to fulfil His promises? Our answer depends on whether we have received the Holy Spirit.

Split infinitive This, the saying or writing of to really think, to boldly go, etc., is the best known of the imaginary rules that petty linguistic tyrants seek to lay upon the English language. There is no grammatical reason whatever against splitting an infinitive and often the avoidance of one lands the writer in trouble, as in Fowler’s example: The men are declared strongly to favour a strike. Here, in the course of evading the suspect to strongly favour, the writer has left the reader in some doubt whether strongly applies to the declaring or the favouring. As Fowler remarks elsewhere in his article: It is of no avail merely to fling oneself desperately out of temptation; one must do it so that no traces of the struggle remain; that is, sentences must be thoroughly remodelled instead of having a word lifted from its original place and dumped elsewhere. A warning that every writer, at least, should take generally to heart. Towards the end of the piece, Fowler lays down his recommended policy: We will split infinitives rather than be barbarous or artificial; more than that, we will freely admit that sufficient recasting will get rid of any s[plit] i[nfinitive] without involving either of those faults, [and] yet reserve to ourselves the right of deciding in each case whether recasting is worth while. The whole Fowler notice deserves and repays perusal, all 1800-odd words of it. See MEU, pp. 558–561. That last sentence of his is as true as any such sentence can be. But although he was writing nearly seventy years ago, the ‘rule’ against split infinitives shows no signs of yielding to reason. This fact prompts some gloomy conclusions. One such is that anti-split-infinitive fanatics are beyond reason. Another is that, whatever anybody may say, split infinitives are still to be avoided in most circumstances. Consider: people with strong erroneous views about ‘correct’ English are just the sort of people who consider your application for a job, decide whether you are ‘educated’ or not, wonder about your general suitability for this and that (e.g. your inclusion in a reading list). Do you want to be right or do you want to get on? – sorry, to succeed. I personally think that to split an infinitive is perfectly legitimate, but I do my best never to split one in public and I would certainly not advise anybody else to do so, even today. Today we have reached a point at which some of our grammatical martinets have not actually been taught grammar, with the result that they are as hard as ever on the big SI without being at all clear what it is. Indeed, even their slightly better-educated predecessors were often shaky on the point, seeming to think that a phrase like ‘X is thought to be easily led’ contained an example. Any ungainly departure from natural word-order is likely to betray a fear that a splittable infinitive may be lurking somewhere in the reeds. When a correspondent, a self-declared Yorkshireman, demands of the editor of The Times, ‘Have you lost completely your sense of proportion?’ seasoned campaigners will sniff the air, in this case and others without result. But nobody is ever quite safe.

It is strange that people should talk so much about ending all war at a time when the ravages it causes are greater than they have ever been, not only because the means of destruction have been multiplied, but also because, as wars are no longer fought between comparatively small armies composed solely of professional soldiers, all the individuals on both sides are flung against each other indiscriminately, including those who are the least qualified for this kind of function. Here again is a striking example of modern confusion, and it is truly portentous, for those who care to reflect upon it, that a 'mass uprising' or a 'general mobilization' should have come to be considered quite natural, and that with very few exceptions the minds of all should have accepted the idea of an 'armed nation'. In this also can be seen an outcome of the belief in the power of numbers alone: it is in keeping with the quantitative character of modern civilization to set in motion enormous masses of combatants; and at the same time, egalitarianism also finds its expression here, as well as in systems such as 'compulsory education' and 'universal suffrage'. Let it be added that these generalized wars have only been made possible by another specifically modern phenomenon, that is, by the formation of 'nations' -a consequence on the one hand of the destruction of the feudal system, and on the other of the disruption of the higher unity of medieval Christendom.

When we first arrived at the school we received an extended introduction detailing what a wonderful place it was and how lucky we were to be there. But no one explained exactly why we were to be there. Yes, we understood the general objective was to accumulate knowledge, although learning Shakespeare and algebra did not strike us as particularly helpful to our future lives. I've yet to meet a single person who found a use for algebra in later life. The excuse proffered was that it developed intelligence. It struck me as extremely unintelligent not to give us the opportunity to study subjects that would be of practical use as well as develop our intelligence. I learned Boyle's law and Ohm's law parrot fashion without having a clue as to their meaning, yet left the school five years later incapable of changing a fuse or wiring a three-pin plug. Understandably, we formed the general impression that we were there for the same reason we were sent to Sunday school – to keep us out of mischief until we were old enough to work.

They found that in other developing countries, parents’ education was the most decisive factor in determining how much a child would earn someday. But in China, the decisive factor was “parental connections.” A separate study of parents and children in Chinese cities found “a strikingly low level of intergenerational mobility.

For a variety of reasons, most of them negative (he didn’t have the liability of so-and-so; as a state rather than a federal officeholder he had no record on such-and-such), he was among those thought to be attractive vice presidential candidates. “Are you interested in the vice presidency, Governor?” a reporter would ask, knowing he couldn’t answer yes or no. Over the next several months he went through a series of responses. On this occasion he was experimenting with the unhappy analogy of being struck by lightning. “That’s very flattering, but it’s all just surreal,” he would say. “It’s so unlikely. But if lightning does strike, I’d be lying if I said I’d hang up the phone.” Saying yes or no to a lightning strike didn’t sound right. But at first he couldn’t even get the lightning line right. “If that lightning bolt strikes,” he would say, or “If that lightning bolt falls in my direction,” or “If that ball of lightning ever does come my way.

The finding that rereading textbooks is often labor in vain ought to send a chill up the spines of educators and learners, because it’s the number one study strategy of most people—including more than 80 percent of college students in some surveys—and is central in what we tell ourselves to do during the hours we dedicate to learning. Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time consuming. It doesn’t result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the content.

Nothing is more certain than that whatever has to court public favor for its support will sooner or later be prostituted to utilitarian ends. The educational institutions of the United States afford a striking demonstration of this truth. Virtually without exception, liberal education, that is to say, education centered about ideas and ideals, has fared best in those institutions which draw their income from private sources. They have been able, despite limitations which donors have sought to lay upon them, to insist that education be not entirely a means of breadwinning. This means that they have been relatively free to promote pure knowledge and the training of the mind; they have afforded a last stand for “antisocial” studies like Latin and Greek. In state institutions, always at the mercy of elected bodies and of the public generally, and under obligation to show practical fruits for their expenditure of money, the movement toward specialism and vocationalism has been irresistible. They have never been able to say that they will do what they will with their own because their own is not private. It seems fair to say that the opposite of the private is the prostitute. Not

We were in the Crocodile Environmental Park at the zoo when Steve first told me the story of Acco’s capture. I just had to revisit him after hearing his story. There he was, the black ghost himself, magnificently sunning on the bank of his billabong. Standing there next to this impressive animal, I tried to wrap my mind around the idea that people had wanted him dead. His huge, intimidating teeth made him look primeval, and his osteodermal plates gleamed black in the sun--a dinosaur, living here among us. I felt so emotional, contemplating the fear-based cruelty that prompted humans to hate these animals. For his part, Acco still remembered his capture, even though it had happened nearly a decade before. Whenever Steve went into his enclosure, Acco would stalk him and strike, exploding out of the water with the intent to catch Steve unaware. Despite the conflict in Steve’s soul over whether he had done the right thing, I decided that Acco’s capture had to be. In the zoo, Acco had his own territory to patrol and a beautiful female crocodile, Connie, who loved him dearly. Left in the wild, somebody would have eventually shot him. If the choice is between a bullet and living in the Crocodile Environmental Park, I think his new territory was much more preferable. When I met Steve in 1991, he had just emerged from a solid decade in the bush, either with Bob or on his own, with just his dog Chilli, and later Sui. Those years had been like a test of fire. As a boy all Steve wanted to do was to be like his dad. At twenty-nine he’d become like Bob and then some. He had done so much more than catch crocs. In the western deserts, he and Bob helped researchers from the Queensland Museum understand the intricacies of fierce snake behavior. Steve also embarked on a behavioral study of a rare and little-understood type of arboreal lizard, the canopy goanna, scrambling up into trees in the rain forests of Cape York Peninsula in pursuit of herpetological knowledge. As much as Steve had become a natural for television, over the course of the 1980s he had become a serious naturalist as well. His hands-on experience, gleaned from years in the bush, meshed well with the more abstract knowledge of the academics. No one had ever accomplished what he had, tracking and trapping crocodiles for months at a time on his own. He would hand Bindi and Robert his knowledge of nature and the bush, just as Bob and Lyn had handed it down to him. This is what few people understood about Steve--his relationship with his family, and the tradition of passion and commitment and understanding that passed from generation to generation. Later on, that Irwin family tradition would bring Steve untold grief, when outsiders misjudged his effort to educate his children and crucified him for it.

It strikes me as unfortunate that this approach - affording the same dignity to and investing in the same quality for a poor child as you would for your own - is so often received as provocative.

It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort,

New version: A republican Government was established under George Lavoff, a member of the Royal Family. It failed to secure popular support and proved incapable of ending the war or of effecting social and economic reforms. At this time, Lenin arrived in Russia and this gave impetus to the Russian people. A new Government with Lenin as President was evolved. First, Lenin made the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. Then land and other capital goods were nationalised. All agricultural land was taken away from the landlords and divided among the peasants. All factories became the property of the State. The privileges of the clergy and the nobility were abolished. Mines, railways and banks were taken over by the Government. And thus to the astonishment of all, a new world, based upon Socialism, took shape in Russia and the dreams of Karl Marx were realized in this way. Old version: Lenin established a Workers’ Government. But the first election showed that the Bolsheviks had no majority. However, to maintain themselves in power, they dissolved the Duma on the ground that it was reactionary. Local Soviets who did not support the Bolsheviks were also disbanded. Private schools were forbidden and education was taken over by the State. Voting right was denied to the nobility and the clergy. Communism encourages violence, and does not believe in an omnipotent God. The Communists forget that man has a soul. It is a one-party Government that prevails in Communist Russia. There is neither freedom of opinion nor of religion. Many other defects in the System may also strike the eye of an observant critic.

In fact, surveys consistently show that African Americans are generally less supportive of harsh criminal justice policies than whites, even though blacks are far more likely to be victims of crime.71 This pattern is particularly striking given that less educated people tend to be more punitive and blacks on average are less educated than whites.72

My grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and great-great-great-grandfather were Torah scribes - and for all I know the tradition goes back to the days before the Diaspora. The texts I compose and redact are not sacred, but I am a kind of scribe as well. I count myself proudly among the people of the book. I commit to paper the stories of those who came before me. What we have done, what we have lost, what remains, what we can pass on - this is the scope of my work. The family work, as I now understand. Though I have ceased to attend synagogue and don't claim my ancestors' knowledge or share their faith, I have come to love and revere the Judaism that sustained my family through the generations. The more I learn about them, the more amazed I am by the breadth and originality of their lives. Their daring, their drive, their inventiveness and ambition and confidence and secret melancholy strike me now like something out of Dos Passos or Isaac Bashevis Singer. They were giants; wittingly or not, they enacted epics. They gave me so much, these fierce, passionate immigrants - my life, my freedom and privileges, my education, my identity, my country. The least I can do is give their stories back to them.

Let us explore the deep involvement of G4S in the global prison-industrial complex. I am not only referring to the fact that the company owns and operates private prisons all over the world, but that it is helping to blur the boundary between schools and jails. In the US schools in poor communities of color are thoroughly entangled with the security state, so much so that sometimes we have a hard time distinguishing between schools and jails. Schools look like jails; schools use the same technologies of detection as jails and they sometimes use the same law enforcement officials. In the US some elementary schools are actually patrolled by armed officers. As a matter of fact, a recent trend among school districts that cannot afford security companies like G4S has been to offer guns and target practice to teachers. ... it is actually a striking example of the extent to which security has found its way into the educational system, and thus also of the way education and incarceration have been linked under the sign of capitalist profit. This example also demonstrates that the reach of the prison-industrial complex is far beyond the prison.

Perhaps the most devastating emotion young boys experience as they grow up is shame. No one enjoys shame, but boys may actually fear it. Shame strikes at a boy's heart; it causes him to close down and to avoid connection with adults at the very time he needs it most. Importantly, you should recognize that the outside world will "toughen up" your boy; your job is to nurture and encourage him. All boys inevitably learn the hard lessons about being a "real man." You can best help your son by nurturing his heart and spirit and providing compassion when the world hurts him.

ON JULY 1, 2006, Cory Booker officially took office as the new mayor of Newark. He’d gained fame in the late ’90s as a city councilman who would sleep in a tent at city housing projects, hold hunger strikes and live on food stamps, patrol bad neighborhoods himself and physically confront the dealers holding down their corners. His victory was the first regime change in two decades, and it happened only after six years of near-bloody battling between the young, charismatic, light-skinned, Stanford-Yale-Oxford-educated upstart and the old, grizzled, but equally charismatic incumbent. The tension between Cory Booker and Sharpe James had been national news for most of the ’00s. The 2002 election, which Booker lost, was documented in the Oscar-nominated Streetfight, which between talking head interviews showed intense footage of the predominantly poor, black constituents who ardently supported James’s altercating with the working-class whites and Puerto Ricans who fought for Booker and his eloquent calls for public service and revitalization. The documentary was a near-perfect picture of a specific place and time: the declining city at risk of being left behind, the shoulder-height view of the vast number of problems in play, and the presentation of two equal and opposing paths forward whose backers were split almost definitively along socioeconomic lines. The 2002 election had been beyond combative; a riot nearly broke out when Booker showed up at a street basketball tournament that Sharpe James was already attending, and James called Booker “a Republican who took money from the KKK and the Taliban . . . who’s collaborating with the Jews to take over Newark.” When James—who was constantly being investigated for various alleged corruptions—won the election by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent, his victory seemed to cement Newark’s representation of “permanent poverty,” a culture of violence and corruption (at least if you subscribed to the New York Times).

The students wanted to strike on behalf of the local people of Santa Cruz—who loathed them. The strike was a boycott of grapes. The students picketed the local stores that sold grapes. The locals bought up all the grapes and waved them in the students’ faces. There seemed to be no understanding among anybody. The troopers were there to protect students from club-bearing locals. The students thought the locals were oppressed by troopers. Education, perhaps, in its own way, suffered. “The only way you can get even a quorum of a class here,” a professor told me, “is with a class in Sensitivity Training or Transcendental Meditation.” I left soon.

we know from a number of individual developing countries. In the last three decades, many low- to middle-income countries have opened up to trade. Strikingly, what happened to their income distribution in the following years has almost always gone in the opposite direction of what the basic Stolper-Samuelson logic would suggest. The wages of the low-skilled workers, who are abundant in these countries (and should therefore have been helped), fell behind relative to those of their higher-skilled or better-educated counterparts.

As the social sciences became increasingly central to the formulation of public policy, this doctrine reinforced the political and legal drive for school desegregation. So powerful was the presumption that when Congress in 1964 ordered a survey on “the lack of availability of equal educational opportunity for individuals by reason of race, color, religion or national origin,” James Coleman, the study’s director, could tell an interviewer even before the field work was done: “… the study will show the difference in the quality of schools that the average Negro child and the average white child are exposed to. You know yourself that the difference is going to be striking.” So Coleman and most of the academic establishment were startled and dismayed eight months later by just how little difference his survey detected. When the results were in from this, the second-largest social science research project in history, they produced conclusions sharply at variance with the reigning doctrine. Popular impressions to the contrary, Coleman’s investigators found little difference between physical facilities and curricula at black and white schools. Moreover, the differences they did recognize had little effect on black and white performance. Even racial integration had relatively little impact on student achievement, as measured by standardized tests. The significant variables lay, not in the schools at all, but in the homes from which the children came and the cultural and class influences surrounding those homes. If the Coleman Report—as it came to be known—was a thunderclap in the cloistered world of social science research, its implications for public policy were even more earthshaking. Science magazine called it “a spear pointed at the heart of the cherished American belief that equality of educational opportunity will increase the equality of educational achievements.” But its implications went even deeper than that. For if the family, not the school, made the difference; if the poor, the black, and the disenfranchised were less susceptible to educational influence than hitherto believed; if differences between Americans were rooted in the bedrock of class—then social progress would be far more difficult to achieve than most people of goodwill had assumed.

Today, corporate campaigns continue to locate the fight in the economic arena by threatening to disrupt profit making, but not through workers withholding their labor. Instead, a new army of college-educated professional union staff bypass the strike and devise other tactics to attack the employer’s bottom line. New Labor’s over-reliance on corporate campaigns has resulted in a war waged between labor professionals and business elites. Works are no longer essential to their own liberation.

There are social deficiencies apt to strike the spirit of young men attending the university and which do strike them, but what is the official admonition? “You students should not concern yourselves with politics. You must attend to your studies and after you have formed yourselves, then go into the world,” Yes. That is quite so, but education today does not form an intelligence capable of visualizing the epoch and the problems of the times in which they live.