Sunday roundup

 My most recent essay at Precipice has to do with what eduction is and is not. It is not about preparing one for a career or making someone obsessed with his or her demographic classification. Ideally, an educated person would be one who retained a broad, lifelong curiosity, and who felt spurred to cultivate wisdom, humility, civic bonds and a sense of the transcendent, who was in awe of what his or her species had achieved over the last three millennia or so.

I came across this First Things piece by Harvard historian James Hankins shortly after writing it. It's entitled "Virtue vs Virtue-Signaling." A taste:

The question I’m left with now is how long elites can remain elite when their “elite” educational system is turning the next generation into ignoramuses, people who have never been allowed to think for themselves, androids who know only how to repeat the approved slogans and adopt approved attitudes. A decade from now, won’t the children who have been brought up on great literature, encouraged to think for themselves, taught how to argue and speak with eloquence, urged to develop their full humanity, children who know history and poetry and philosophy—won’t they become the new elite, the “true nobility”?

An example of a truly educated person can be found in this interview with Leon Kass, the Addie Harding Clark Professor Emeritus of Social Thought at the University of Chicago:

When someone introduces me for a lecture, and they recite my path through life—medicine, biochemistry, St. John’s Great Books, Chicago, bioethics, the Hebrew Bible—from the outside, it sounds like this is a guy who didn’t know what he was doing and had a midlife crisis every five years. From the inside, it’s one life.

I like to say everybody has one question. If you’ve got any questions, you’ve got one. And my question is how to live a humanly rich life for yourself and help create a community that’s conducive to most people having a crack at living a humanly rich life for themselves, separately and together.

This fits with the fact that, of all the things I love in life, it’s serious conversation that I love the most: serious conversation about the questions that matter, in the service of trying to make people thoughtful about how they’re living, and how to make the most of this very precious gift of life on Earth, which we have not by merit or by right.

We live in a world in which the dangers and the threats to living a humanly rich life are legion, from the distraction of the cell phone and social media to the threats of degradation, of hatred and prejudice and inequality, to the dehumanization of new technologies. How do we keep the world safe for the highest human possibilities of heart and mind and soul?

It’s of a piece. It’s taken different forms in different places. But from the inside, it seems seamless. I was 15 when I started college. I was too young. I was majoring in the sciences and did fine. That doesn’t require maturity. I didn’t take to the humanistic side very well until Joseph Schwab, PhB’30, SM’36, PhD’38, woke me up in my last year and showed me that there were questions to which the answers I thoughtlessly held were inadequate.

That was the beginning of my education, but I owe the University of Chicago everything. I owe it for having shown me that learning for its own sake rather than for something useful was a supreme part of a rich life. I owe it for showing me that asking questions that go to the root of things is the best possible way to think about things.

I learned this there. I acquired lifelong friends. I acquired the love of my life. We were invited back to Chicago to practice that for 34 years, an inestimable blessing.

Another example serendipitously came across my radar screen as well. At The Dispatch, Guy Denton takes an in-depth look at the life and career of of Robert P. George, the director of Princeton University's  James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. His is a life containing many colorful chapters.

James Broughel at Discourse says that, yes, patently out-to-lunch figures such as Paul Krugman have won the Nobel Prize in Economics, but let us remember that even mostly-head-on-straight guys like 1986 recipient James Buchanan have some decidedly underbaked notions in their track records. 

Seattle talk-show host Jason Rantz says that separating groups into demographics that can't possibly inhabit the same society is underway in his area to the point that, well . . . 

The school delivered the ghoulish news in an Oct. 8 newsletter to parents.

“As a school with foundational beliefs around equity for our students and families, we are moving away from our traditional ‘Pumpkin Parade’ event and requesting that students do not come to school in costumes,” the newsletter reads.

Even though the news will disappoint students, the newsletter says, the decision is meant to show respect for all B.F. Day students.

Halloween events create a situation where some students must be excluded for their beliefs, financial status, or life experience. Costume parties often become an uncomfortable event for many children, and they distract students and staff from learning. Large events create changes in schedules with loud noise levels and crowds. Some students experience over stimulation, while others must deal with complex feelings of exclusion. It’s uncomfortable and upsetting for kids.

Nothing says equity quite like making every student miss out on the fun because some administrator invented a scenario where students feel excluded. And we wouldn’t want to distract students from learning — except, of course, on National Walkout Day when students were allowed to ditch learning to form a giant peace sign in a political protest on gun violence.

Mary Hasson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, writing at National Review, asks, "Is It 'Emotional Abuse' for Parents to Deny a Child's Transgender Claims?"

At Reason, Nick Gillespie interviews Chloe Valdare, who is a champion of social and emotional learning in the broadest sense, but has an entirely different approach from most of those who advocate it:

Let's say I run a corporation and I want to bring you in to facilitate better relationships across my staff. How do you proceed? What does the Theory of Enchantment look like?

You could have us come in and do an actual day-long workshop, just to pilot a program to see if you really agree with or like our approach. Or you could enroll in our self-paced program, which anyone can enroll in at any time.

Those are structured differently. But both of them are based upon the three foundational principles of the Theory of Enchantment, which are: Treat people like human beings, not political abstractions. Criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down or destroy. And try to root everything you do in loving compassion. So the objective of both of those approaches is to get the practitioner embodying those three practices.

What are the exercises that lead to that?

In our workshop, for example, when we talk about treating people like human beings, not political abstractions, we then have to unpack what it means to be a human being. Which is quite inexhaustible, actually, and quite vast, which is part of the beauty and the wonder of what it means to be human. So people go through different practices that have to do with vulnerability, that have to do with exploring tools like stoicism, which helps us as a species deal with things like our need for control.

The reason for this is very simple. When we talk about the concept of supremacy, supremacy is not just a racial concept. If someone cuts me off in the street and I begin to see that person as less than me, to see myself as greater than or better than that person, I have entered into a supremacist superiority complex, right? And when I'm doing that, I'm basically acting out of insecurity. I'm using supremacy as a defensive mechanism, because I am operating out of a sense of lack. So all the exercises in the Theory of Enchantment help the practitioners develop tools to deal with their insecurities—because all human beings have insecurities, unless you're the Buddha or something—so you'll be less likely to overcompensate for them by being attracted to supremacist ways of thinking. And again, it's not strictly racial. It's a fundamentally base human instinct that we get looped in as a defensive mechanism.

One of the things I found really interesting is your use of literature and popular culture. You use music, books, movies, etc., to explore these themes. Can you talk about that? It seems like a really good way to break down abstractions, because you're talking about a common text. But then it also seems like the minute you start talking about a particular song (and you use some hip-hop stuff) or particular writing (you use a lot of pieces by James Baldwin), you're immediately going to start fighting with each other. What are some of the specific texts you use, and how does that play out?

I love the arts. I've always been drawn to the arts. I love literature. I love dance. I love music. And the reason we use these as tools to give people the sense of an affordance of a common humanity is because, even though we're living at a time where it's politically in vogue to caricature people and to reduce people, the task of the arts is to give expression to the full range of the human condition. This is something that one learns, for example, when going to acting school and being in theater.

We use, as you said, sources from hip-hop. We use Kendrick Lamar. In our full self-paced training, we use songs by Lil Wayne. But it's a full range. So there's songs in there by John Mayer. There's literature in there by John Steinbeck. There's literature by Cheryl Strayed. There are snippets of Disney films that are used as prompts for exploration and identity discovery.

Joe Manchin is my favorite Democrat.