An article published in March by Steven Wasserman, In Defense of Difficulty and subtitled A phony populism is denying Americans the joys of serious thought., begins: It is a commonplace to bemoan the vanishing of serious criticism in our popular culture. The past, it is said, was a golden age. More than 25 years ago, … [Read more…]
In a recent essay, Deep States and the Modern American Citizen, I addressed the ways in which members and gangs of members of the ruling class of the modern world, and many other ages of man, use crimes—even brutal and murderous crimes—as tools to gain control over other human beings or human communities. In the … [Read more…]
I’ve written before of the modern tendency to use glossy pictures and even fast-moving images to teach, even to teach subjects requiring some concentration and some use of abstract reasoning. This is absurd. It’s been known since at least the work of the English psychologist, Richard Gregory, that the human brain—like the brains of monkeys … [Read more…]
I’ll be publishing this essay in three parts. This first part will deal with an essay by Donald Kagan, Ave atque vale, which provides a highly summarized history of liberal arts education in the West along with a few hints toward a profound understanding of human knowledge and education and, finally, an assessment of the … [Read more…]
Math is hard, Barbie, and that goes for you too, Ken. It’s hard like tennis or basketball or baseball, requiring hours of hard work on basic skills when you really have little clue how those skills will really be used. When you have the basic skills of arithmetic or of fielding and throwing the ball, … [Read more…]
Families with tendencies towards autistic traits tend to cluster in regions with opportunities for the exercise of ‘systemizing’ skills: see the article Diagnosed Autism Is More Common in an IT-Rich Region, Study Finds for a discussion of this interesting yet less than surprising discovery. Specifically: The researchers predicted that autism spectrum conditions (ASC) would be … [Read more…]
This article, Poorer Reading Skills Following Changed Computer Habits of Children, discusses a study in which the reading abilities of children have deteriorated since 1970 in two countries in which children use computers more often in school and outside of school. That is, reading ability “has fallen rapidly since 1991 in both the US and … [Read more…]