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Category Archives: Education
Another Road
The Blue elites are wrong:
It is easy to see how rational people can conclude that the only hope of preserving mass prosperity in America comes from transfers and subsidies. If we add to this the belief that only a powerful and intrusive regulatory state can prevent destructive climate change, then the case for the blue utopia looks ironclad. To save the planet, save the middle class and provide American minorities and single mothers with the basic elements of an acceptable life, we must set up a far more powerful federal government than we have ever known, and give it sweeping powers over the production and distribution of wealth.
But what if this isn’t true? What if the shift from a late-stage industrial economy to an information economy has a different social effect? What if the information revolution continues and even accelerates the democratization of political, social and cultural life by empowering ordinary people? What if the information revolution, like the industrial revolution, ultimately leads to a radical improvement in the way ordinary people live and opens up vast new horizons of human potential and freedom?
Obviously nobody knows what the future holds, and anything anybody says about the social consequences of the information revolution is mostly conjecture; still, the elegantly paternalistic pessimism of our elites about the future of the masses seems both defeatist and overdone. The information revolution, one should never forget, may be disruptive but more fundamentally it is good news. Human productivity is rising dramatically. If the bad news is that fewer and fewer people will earn a living working in factories, the good news is that a smaller and smaller percentage of the time and energy of the human race must be devoted to the manufacture of the material objects we need for daily life. Just as it’s good news overall when agricultural productivity increases and the majority of the human race no longer has to spend its time providing food, it’s good news when we as a species can free ourselves from the drudgery and monotony of factory work.
Good news is bad news for people who don’t like (other people to have) freedom. They need a crisis to not waste.
Moral Disarmament
How our kids are being indoctrinated against the Constitution:
In a child’s imagination, a thumb and forefinger make a handy play gun. Some adults, however, see a fully cocked finger and their imaginations run wild. Maybe they imagine today’s finger-pointer coming back one day as a homicidal maniac and pointing a real gun at them. Maybe they see a future NRA member — another threat to their dream of a gun-free world. It’s obvious they don’t see a cop protecting them from robbers, or a soldier from our country’s enemies.
Punishing kids for finger guns has nothing to do with school safety; they know the difference between a finger and a gun as well as adults do. It has everything to do with “moral disarmament.”
What’s more, the idea of using schools as conditioning grounds is not new. Thomas Sowell discusses it at length in his 2009 book “Intellectuals and Society.” After the horrors of World War I, intellectuals of the time determined that “war” and “weapons,” not other nations, were the real enemies. They promoted both military disarmament and “disarming of the mind.”
And didn’t that work out well.
More and more, sending kids to public school seems to constitute child abuse.
The War On Science
…by an idiot “gender studies” professor. A male one.
These departments need to be the first to go when the academic bubble pops.
“Gun-Free” School Zones
A Libertarian ad campaign to end them.
Good.
Most High Schools
…are almost sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents.
The only problem I had in high school was no girlfriends. I had lots of friends who were girls, though.
It’s Not Just The Law Schools
Too many students chasing too few jobs. Any other industry that was so deceptive and manupulative, and offered such a poor value for the money, would be excoriated by the media, if not subject to actual civil and criminal lawsuits.
Gun Clubs At Schools
As Glenn notes, this is about oikophobia, even though it’s as, or more, important for kids to learn about the proper use and handling of guns as it is for them to learn to drive, particularly considering that the former is a fundamental constitutional right. As Glenn notes, this insane “gun-free zone” and “zero tolerance” policies have been a horrific failure.
I wonder if drum and bugle corps still carry the wooden rifles, as they did when I was in high school? Or is that too “terroristic“? More and more, it seems like sending your kids to a public school constitutes parental malpractice.
[Update a few minutes later]
Why are anti-gun activists so violent? as Glenn says, maybe the people we need to keep guns away from are elected Democrats.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Related: the loving, tolerant Left:
Over the last few years, I’ve heard the left talk about how hateful conservatives can be. Being a libertarian, there have been plenty of occasions where I disagreed with conservatives in discussions on social issues, but I’ve never at any moment gotten to the point where they were berating me or wishing harm upon me.
Needless to say, I’m strongly considering sending this one to the police since the e-mail address, which I’ve left off the post, is from a legitimate account.
They don’t want us to have guns because they project and think that we’re as violent and deranged as they are.
Universities Must Stop Charging So Much
…for delivering so little and sending students into a lifetime of debt.
The Occumorons were protesting in the wrong places.
The Constitution
A readable version, for the 21st century. I haven’t looked at it in detail, but it seems like an interest project, at least in theory. Maybe people like Ezra Klein should give it a whirl.