A collection of 401 posts
As a skinny, unathletic nerd, I had no desire to play high-school football. Fortunately, no one compelled me to do so. Even if I could have become an adequate player by expending massive effort, much of the time I spent playing would have come at the expense of learning things
A review of The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s by Ellen Schrecker. University of Chicago Press, 616 pages (December 2021). The 1960s were the tipping point of postwar American history at which the conservativism of the previous decade evolved into an era of growing liberal consensus. Historian James
Maus was important to my life, but there's nothing wrong with protecting kids from encountering the world’s worst horrors before they are old enough to understand them.
Activists have discovered that the best form of defence is attack.
The model of life they imagine is based on the myth of an all-purpose education designed by experts to allow every child to choose any future they like.
In November 1933, as rector of Freiburg University, Martin Heidegger published a letter urging students to vote “yes” in support of Hitler’s decision to leave the League of Nations. “German men and women!” Heidegger wrote, “The Führer is asking nothing from the people. Rather, he is giving the people
What would happen if everyone took the time to write what they actually believe about land ownership and historical moral responsibility, instead of simply repeating a mantra they have been handed by a DEI bureaucrat?
A surfeit of reparations advocates (including Ta-Nehisi Coates) are openly disdainful of the diversity rationale—just not so disdainful as to actually oppose diversity initiatives.
I have watched the culture here slowly change—the troubling values I fled so far from followed me like a sort of reverse Manifest Destiny.
We need to break the spell of illiberal ideology, and come back to our collective senses—to stop self-censoring in fear of the mob and excusing nonsense in the name of political allyship, and to start defending the values of pluralism, humanism, and democracy.
Wooldridge argues that meritocracy can only survive if it is infused with an ethos that prioritizes virtue, applying talent to ends that ennoble rather than enrich.
Education was divided along confessional lines into Catholic and Protestant school systems; for these purposes, Jews were designated Protestant.
The Private School Boy is an object of endless horror and fascination. Every few years, the media outrage cycle will crest towards another scandal—a leaked video of a sexist chant, allegations of sexual misconduct or orgiastic excess—and the discourse machine will dissect the sexual mores of elite teenagers
Implementation of newly popular equity policies will hinder the learning of many students before those policies are weakened or reversed.
Our society cannot and will not survive a polity that permits armed children to walk the streets and kill with impunity.