Secular folks should worry.

[Kishkumen]

Amen, Reverend.

I arrived home to learn the date has been rescheduled, so I defer that particular worry and just enjoy a beautiful evening in the Pacific Northwest.

Peace of mind is something to savor.

[Res Ipsa]

Amen, Reverend.

I arrived home to learn the date has been rescheduled, so I defer that particular worry and just enjoy a beautiful evening in the Pacific Northwest.

Peace of mind is something to savor.

Indeed.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

GenZ drag queen smokes family of five after they asked him to stop firing his AR-15 in his front yard - apparently babies need to learn to sleep with the lullabying sounds of semi-automatic gun fire here in the USA:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... -year-old/

Is this civil society?

- Doc

[Physics Guy]

Here's an interesting article: https://css.cua.edu/wp-content/uploads/ ... ersity.pdf

Thanks, that was interesting. Adler’s point in that paper seems to be that declining enrollments in humanities isn’t just fallout from 1990s culture wars, but started nearly a hundred years earlier with the loosening of undergraduate curricula in American colleges to allow many free electives. That's history I didn't know, but it's a familiar fact to me that North American curricula allow a lot more electives than European ones do.

A typical "major" concentration in the US and Canada will give you a Bachelor with Honours for passing 40 one-semester courses, and fully half of these will likely be free electives that can be in any subject you want, regardless of your major. This is partly because the North American freshman year is normally a smorgasbord in which you only have to take one course in your major subject; the upper years usually make you take three. European university degrees are much more narrowly focused. Over here you'll take about as many courses in your major but hardly any electives.

I read the linked Adler paper as referring to a three-way American academic debate between: a “Great Books” approach of teaching a predefined canon; the kind of iconoclastic progressivism that is the bogeyperson of conservatives; and a Philistine pragmatism that wants universities to be 21st-century trade schools. Adler seems mostly to buy Alan Bloom's contention that too much progressivism had brought a Philistine backlash, and the only way to save humanities departments from losing all their students to business schools was to restore canonical standards and make everyone read the great books. Adler does seem willing to broaden the canon of Great Books to make it more global, and not just a library of dead white European men.

This particular paper doesn't seem to be about Adler's reasons why these canonical classics of the world are important. I didn't notice him trying to make that case here. He just quotes, with what I think is implicit approval, some contemporary critics of the early 20th century introduction of elective-heavy curricula, to the effect that the wisdom of the ages was being subordinated to sophomore whims. To find Adler's explanation of how wise all that aged wisdom still really is, I guess I'll have to read his book. That's still the thing that most interests me.

The historical background of how American college curricula got loosened was still interesting, though. Adler quotes the original American advocates of electives speaking explicitly in Darwinian and capitalist terms, about different courses and subjects competing for students. I don't think he pursues this market theme as far as one could.

In a German university one obtains a degree, not by accumulating forty passed courses but mainly by passing four or five hour-long oral exams and submitting an acceptable thesis. There are a few other requirements but they are easy to meet; the major hurdles are pretty rigorous. If you can fake it one-on-one with me for an hour, you’re not faking. And even at the undergraduate level your thesis is likely to be a small part of a professor's research project; you've got a shot at ending up as a co-author on a peer-reviewed paper.

One normally prepares for those big exams and the thesis by attending about as many lectures or seminars as an American undergrad would in their major subject, and you do have to scrape a minimal passing grade on them to become eligible for the important oral exams. The philosophy, though, is that lectures and seminars are not your education, but only tools provided to help you educate yourself.

And the university education that your degree certifies is understood as a specialised training, not some kind of all-round civilisational improvement. Europeans just don't generally think of universities as being about doing that kind of thing—not because Europeans don't care about it, but because they expect the all-round education to be finished in high school, which is generally quite a bit tougher over here than in North America.

So in effect I think that German universities, and probably other European ones also, are a sort of combination of the trade-school and Great Books approaches. For that matter the radical iconoclastic pole of the American triad is also institutionalised here in Germany. Professors are allowed to teach whatever we want, to the point where if I decided that the right way to teach quantum mechanics was to have the class meditate on The All for three hours every week, no-one could question that.

So somehow all three poles of American academia are recognisable here, but seem to me to be synthesised. I think the real difference in higher education may simply be economic.

Germany has no tuition fees.

German students aren’t consumers because they are not the customers. They are not the ones paying. From this point of view, the American proliferation of elective courses isn't a philosophical viewpoint.

It's supersizing.

Most American restaurants only serve food in enormous portions. No-one complains, because those heaping plates are clearly value for money, but what it means is that people have to buy more, because every item on the menu is big. In the same way, a Bachelor's curriculum half-composed of electives makes students pay twice the tuition that they would otherwise pay. We sell it as a great thing.

Broad education is valuable, right, absolutely. The big plate's full of good food. You have to order the whole thing to graduate. You don't have to eat it—you just have to buy it. You can leave most of the fries on your plate. You can take easy courses, slide through, electives aren't weighted. Or take a doggy bag! Keep your textbooks, and read through them sometime. You'll still be here for four years, paying tuition, and probably residence.

The humanities can't just be the supersized fries. There has to be a good reason why you would order them as the one little thing on your plate. So I may be cheering loudly for Eric Adler—if he can make that case.

[Morley]

Would a civil society include the right to bear arms as described in the second amendment of the constitution? If not, why?

GenZ drag queen smokes family of five after they asked him to stop firing his AR-15 in his front yard - apparently babies need to learn to sleep with the lullabying sounds of semi-automatic gun fire here in the USA:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... -year-old/

Is this civil society?

[Morley]

Another technique I see way too much of. Don’t actually engage. Defray.

I don't think that means what you think it does.

[Morley]

Eric Adler.

Thank you for Adler.

[malkie]

Another technique I see way too much of. Don’t actually engage. Defray.

I don't think that means what you think it does.

Well, I expect that producing the Princess Bride was an expensive undertaking, so ...

[Res Ipsa]

PG, great post. I had not heard this version of the history of the American university either. It very much fits much fits with the free market mythology that has nearly destroyed the concept of public goods in the U.S. That mythology teaches that all a citizen is obligated to do is act in his own best interest, and “the market” will automagically create the best of all possible worlds. That makes “citizenship” into nothing more than “consumer of government service,” with rights to purchase only the goods or services they want “ and no obligations whatsoever.

It’s not just the American University system that’s been transformed into McDonalds — it’s the entire relationship between citizen and government.

This view of the relationship between government and citizen is a fairly recent development. Indeed, the value of public goods and the fact that the private market cannot provide such goods has been a long time. I learned it in first-year economics. The virtual erasure of the concept of public goods from American discourse is part of a deliberate strategy, with its best known proponent in the U.S being Milton Friedman. And by “deliberate” I’m not talking about a shadowy conspiracy. I’m talking about ordinary networks of people working to maximize self interest.

Adler appears to me to be accepting that a publicly funded education is a public good. Thus, he thinks an important consideration that is currently absent from our university system is “what kind of citizens do we want to produce?”

If Amazon needs trained code monkeys, it should pay for that vocational training. Why should the taxpayers pay for vocational education? The rationale for a public university is that it provides a benefit that private markets cannot. An arguable public benefit is an education citizenry that understands what makes a modern democratic country work, as opposed to the idea that losing an election justifies storming the Bastille.

Asking the question “what kind of citizens do we want to create?” Forces us to take seriously the role of values in public education. Personally, I don’t think it’s possible to create an educational system that doesn’t teach values — better to address the issue directly than close our eyes to it.

That is, I think, Adler’s argument for the humanities. It’s in the humanities that universities can can educate students about the history of thought and values that got us to where we are. Obviously, a canon of books written strictly by whites men can’t do that today. But having a canon provides a common reference point in which to build and improve civilization.

That’s what I think the argument is, or at least part of it. If education is a public good, then it should be structured for public benefit. Something like that.

[MG 2.0]

MG, should science receive an outright ban on being taught in Utah public schools by the State Legislature?

Of course not. But I also think that the ideas of folks like Stephen Meyer ought to be entered into the curriculum strands to give students the opportunity to hear what non Darwinists have to say about life origins, evolution and the like.

https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer ... -universe/

Excellent podcast, by the way. Meyer gives Shermer a great discussion.

The problem is that GenZ and their parents, and their parents…have been indoctrinated with Darwinism to the exclusion of other ideas that have merit. So then we have a generation going into the world thinking that theism is silly. That, in turn, impacts their worldview in regards to government, culture, morality, etc.

Regards,
MG