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There appears to be some sanity in some schools. We are horrified and sickened by the brutality and inhumanity of Hamas. Murdering innocent civilians including babies and children, raping women and taking the elderly as hostages are not the actions of political disagreement but the actions of hate and terrorism. The basis of all universities […]

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Beth and Andrew speak with author Alexandra Hudson about her recently published book, The Soul of Civility. She discusses the difference between politeness and civility, and shares her opinion on where today’s uncivil society stands in relation to other eras in history. We talk about the role that social media plays in modeling uncivil behavior and Hudson shares tips for how both parents and children can create a more civil world.

Alexandra Hudson is a writer, popular speaker, and the founder of Civic Renaissance, a publication and intellectual community dedicated to beauty, goodness, and truth. She was named the 2020 Novak Journalism Fellow and contributes to Fox News, CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, TIME Magazine, POLITICO Magazine, and Newsweek.

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That’s what I titled my second-to-last seminar in graduate school – the last one being my dissertation defense. The year before, I think I called it Thiaminase Klatsch. And the year before that, Thiaminase Revue. How I tested the patience of faculty and fellow students. At least I had the sense to provide snacks! My […]

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Good Things Do Happen in Public Education

 

There are some good teachers who are doing good things in the public school system. I know this is hard to believe, but it is true.  While many institutions have lost the core mission to simply educate students, not every person in a position of authority in front of children has some weird agenda that will end up on Libs of TikTok.  Perhaps there is even a silent majority of teachers who simply want to teach well?  

Now I understand the pessimism you might feel when living in what one might call “interesting times.”  I have personally been forced to stop academic instruction at a public high school for half of my class as all of my kids were forced to participate in an LGBTQIA2S+ Pride Parade, whatever their beliefs about such matters. I have personally listened to administrators discuss highly charged political issues over the intercom in a public school as if everyone subject to those voices from on high has experienced some “trauma du jour” in the exact same way.  I have been yelled at on a college campus for simply pointing out media bias against conservatives and called a “racist” at a faculty meeting while defending voters who might be Republican.  I have had to sit through DEI training for educators in which stressing “racial essentialism” was considered “correct practice.”  I was once proud to take a summer class in Boston until I realized the elite professors “teaching” me believed in using Herbert Marcuse’s framework for “repressive tolerance.”

Correcting Your Miseducation, Part 3: Some Opinions Are Facts

 

Bad philosophy has caused a lot of confusion and other problems. Sometimes it’s dressed up as something else–theology, science, sociology, law, English class–but it’s still just bad philosophy. Good common sense is an adequate corrective–where available. But sometimes bad philosophy ruins common sense on a wide scale, and good philosophy is a necessary cure.

I fear that may have happened with the error that says, “No opinion is ever a fact.”  The truth is: They aren’t the same category, but opinions and facts do overlap.

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Ezra Cornell said, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study,” and he warnt foolin. (I am assuming without proof that if it’s circa 1869 and your name is Ezra, while you yourself may not have talked like this, people around you did.) Recently on these pages I spoke […]

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Campuses Struggle with Free Speech

 

Freedom of speech is widely acknowledged as vital in the abstract. Yet that principle presents serious problems in its concrete applications. The constitutional text that invokes this principle is both cryptic and emphatic when it says that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” At the time of the founding, the First Amendment bound only the federal government. It was not held to bind the states until 1925 under Gitlow v. New York, when it was further determined that the amendment did not protect any speaker who advocated the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence. To this day, the First Amendment does not apply to any private institution, but without question most of these institutions have incorporated free-speech provisions in their own charter or governance provisions.

The difficulties start, however, with its interpretation in both public and private settings. Courts have resisted the tendency to engage in free-speech absolutism that makes no exceptions or excuses from the constitutional command. Such free-speech exceptionalism does not withstand the test of common sense. We all believe in the freedom of action, but that does not countenance actions such as theft, murder, or rape. And the freedom of speech surely does not protect any threats of the use of force. That simple libertarian observation requires some account of exceptions that should be grafted on to the basic principle of freedom of speech.

Attempts to find the right balance are constantly tested on college campuses, as shown by some recent incidents.

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I see a news report that the United States House has voted overwhelmingly (424-1) to pass a bill to block a Biden Administration interpretation of a provision in a 2022 law (Bipartisan Safer Communities Act) that removed federal funding for school programs that teach hunting, archery, and other firearms-related skills. While I disagree with the […]

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A Weak Shield in the Culture Wars

 

In a recent article in the New York Times, Debra Satz and Dan Edelstein—the dean of Stanford University’s School of Humanities and Sciences, and the faculty director of its program in civic, liberal, and global education, respectively—offer a provocative thesis: “By abandoning civics, colleges helped create the culture wars.” The authors lament the decline in the protection of free speech, singling out the disgraceful effort in March by some students at Stanford Law School to silence a speech that Kyle Duncan, a federal judge, was prepared to give to the Federalist Society chapter.

Both authors point to the failure of our centers of learning to develop the “shared intellectual framework” that could help defuse or prevent such incidents, but they offer a dubious remedy: a new (since 2021) program at Stanford called “Civic, Liberal and Global Education,” or COLLEGE, intended to “steer clear of the cultural issues that doomed Western Civ.”

Let us first put this issue in perspective. I doubt that any such program, however well-conceived, would persuade graduate students in UCLA’s psychology department, for example, not to ban Yoel Inbar, a noted professor from the University of Toronto, for his queries into universities’ commitment to the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) orthodoxy. Nor is it likely that a similar program at Harvard would do much to improve its impoverished culture of free speech, or help prevent a replay of the recent incident in which activists, shouting charges of Israeli “apartheid,” disrupted the convocation ceremony at which Harvard’s new president, Claudine Gay, welcomed new students to campus. What are needed here are not classes but sanctions, requiring violators to make good on Harvard’s public-facing and internal commitment to defend the principles of civilized discourse. As the great University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper put the point in 1892: “The question before us is how to become one in spirit, not necessarily in opinion.”

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At last, I know why there is such a thing: if you’re a balloonist with a commercial-pilot rating, you are automatically also a flight instructor. This is not the case with other aircraft, at this rank I mean. Only at the next higher rank, which is airline-transport, are airplane and helicopter pilots qualified additionally as […]

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I hope it is not a sign of incipient dementia, my remembering too many things! For no reason at all (maybe just saying that is a sign of incipient dementia), I recalled two young Englishwomen I met in South Africa in 1995. They were twin sisters. And they were schoolteachers. Of Welsh. Which they hardly […]

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Dennis Prager Admits He Indoctrinates Children

 

For years, the censors have been trying to characterize Dennis Prager as a right-wing ideologue (and probably a white supremacist, too) and now they have proof:

Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly says he opposes indoctrination in schools. Yet his administration in early July approved materials from a conservative group that says it’s all about indoctrination and ‘changing minds.’

The Florida Department of Education determined that educational materials geared toward young children and high school students created by PragerU, a nonprofit co-founded by conservative radio host Dennis Prager, was in alignment with the state’s standards on how to teach civics and government to K-12 students.

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So perusing the wife’s NY Times Sunday business section. Only part of the paper that is not complete propaganda. Sketches of 17 grads and their brief comments about entering the real world. 10 females (7 white, one Asian, two Hispanic).  7 guys (3 black, 2 Hispanic, one Asian, one white).  A little different that 50 […]

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I don’t know about you, but a good way to cushion controversial or unwelcome personal data is to preface them with “I don’t know about you, but….” Example: I don’t know about you, but I hardly follow up on the comments I have posted on Portuguese Wikipedia. Your own prose on that website you may […]

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I’d like to announce a new Group here on Ricochet called Teaching and Learning Resources.  It is the result of a string of comments in Dr. Bastiat’s post “She’s a Brilliant Teacher. Perhaps She Should Stop.”  It’s also related to Mark Eckes’”I Don’t Give Grades, Students Earn Them.” The goal of the group is to […]

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Joe Selvaggi speaks with Thomas Berry, research fellow at Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies; they explore the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, how it mostly bars race as a factor in determining who gets admitted to college, the sharply contrasting views of American history the decision exposes, and what comes next for colleges seeking to ensure diverse enrollments.

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Conceiving lectures. Like one about dinosaur nutrition. I recently read an excellent book about the consequences, hours and days and years and millennia afterward, of the impact that killed the critters off. That was just offshore from what we now call the Yucatán, the crash site itself is called Chicxulub, the geochronological cusp is called […]

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