Thursday, January 30, 2014
Israel Needs to Learn Some Manners. By Avi Shlaim.
Israel Needs to Learn Some Manners. By Avi Shlaim. New York Times, January 30, 2014.
The Great War’s Long Shadow. By Joschka Fischer.
The Great War’s Long Shadow. By Joschka Fischer. Project Syndicate, January 29, 2014.
The Dead Dream of Charlemagne. By Father Raymond J. de Souza.
The dead dream of Charlemagne. By Father Raymond J. de Souza. National Post, January 30, 2014.
I Have a Plan to Destroy America. By Richard D. Lamm.
I have a plan to destroy America. By Richard D. Lamm. MichelleMalkin.com, February 9, 2008. Also at WND.
Mark Levin on how to destroy America. Audio. The Right Scoop, January 30, 2014. On Lamm article.
Mark Levin on Illegal Immigration and Amnesty, January 30, 2014. Audio. Douglas Woods, January 30, 2014. YouTube. Discussion of Lamm article runs from 4:51 to 13:30 Victor Davis Hanson interview runs from 51:15 to 1:08:51.
Mark Levin on how to destroy America. Audio. The Right Scoop, January 30, 2014. On Lamm article.
Mark Levin on Illegal Immigration and Amnesty, January 30, 2014. Audio. Douglas Woods, January 30, 2014. YouTube. Discussion of Lamm article runs from 4:51 to 13:30 Victor Davis Hanson interview runs from 51:15 to 1:08:51.
A Middle East Primer. By Roger Cohen.
A Middle East Primer. By Roger Cohen. New York Times, January 30, 2014.
Capitalism vs. Democracy. By Thomas B. Edsall.
Capitalism vs. Democracy. By Thomas B. Edsall. New York Times, January 28, 2014.
Our Founding Fathers Must Have Been Paranoid Too, Like Tom Perkins. By Paul Roderick Gregory.
Our Founding Fathers Must Have Been Paranoid Too, Like Tom Perkins. By Paul Roderick Gregory. Forbes, January 28, 2014.
Progressive Kristallnacht Coming? By Tom Perkins. Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2014.
Paranoia of the Plutocrats. By Paul Krugman. New York Times, January 26, 2014.
Tom Perkins and the guilt of the gilded. By Katrina vanden Heuvel. Washington Post, February 4, 2014. Also here.
Progressive Kristallnacht Coming? By Tom Perkins. Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2014.
Paranoia of the Plutocrats. By Paul Krugman. New York Times, January 26, 2014.
Tom Perkins and the guilt of the gilded. By Katrina vanden Heuvel. Washington Post, February 4, 2014. Also here.
This College Professor Has a Message for Liberal Arts Majors. By Hunter Baker.
This College Professor Has a Message for Liberal Arts Majors. By Hunter Baker. The Federalist, January 30, 2014.
Baker:
It’s not a waste of a degree.
As long as I have been alive (more than four decades), the knock on liberal arts majors has been in force. I heard it as a student. I hear it as a professor and academic administrator. “It’s great that you love history (or English or philosophy), but what are you going to DO with that?” The answer, based on the results of a study published in the Wall Street Journal, may surprise you. It turns that out that while students who major in a wide variety of professional fields out-earn their liberal arts peers at the outset, the liberal arts majors tend to pull ahead in later years.
College
is a time of preparation. Thanks to the high cost of tuition, we are looking
for a highly predictable runway to successful and well-compensated
employment. It is easier to envision
that sort of dynamic playing out when your student is a nursing or business
major than it is when the young person wants to major in English. The problem with this view is that it gives
too much credit to the professional fields and not enough to the liberal arts.
If you
really think about learning, there are some master disciplines which unlock all
the others. They are philosophy,
history, mathematics, language (reading/writing), and science (mainly mastery
of the scientific method). These
disciplines form the core of learning and comprise the engine of its
expression. The student who gains
proficiency in these areas will maintain, for virtually the rest of his/her
life, the capacity to learn new things and to organize those new things within
the context of the older things. The
learning that takes place in these areas does not really expire. It does not become dated. It is a fund that maintains its value. The same is not necessarily true of knowledge
gained in professional programs.
The great management theorist Peter Drucker addressed the matter insightfully in his 1957 book Landmarks of Tomorrow (emphasis mine):
Drucker
was right about the kind of education people require in order to thrive. But if we are to put the liberal arts to work
and get the most out of them that we can, we have to address our cultural
expectations. All the players in the
higher education world – students, parents, colleges, governments – need to
give proper priority to the traditional arts and sciences as the keys to
further learning. In other words, we
have to throw out the self-defeating view that those courses are just hurdles
students must jump because they have in the past. They are not hurdles. The traditional fields are fulcrums, levers,
and pulleys that magnify the strength of subsequent learning. Institutions should stop throwing together
core curricula on the basis of turf battles, faculty preference, and expedience
and instead should come up with principled plans for liberal arts cores that
will make them what they should be.
Various professional majors should stop demanding more and more hours at
the expense of liberal arts core curricula.
Without a solid foundation at the bottom, the education at the top will
be poured into a sieve. At a minimum, it
will not be as effective as it otherwise would have been.
Finally,
to return to the issue of liberal arts majors where we began, it is time we
stopped treating them as though they were merely aesthetic in value. The student who has taken the time to read
and understand Shakespeare’s plays and the novels of Jane Austen and Fyodor
Dostoevsky as part of an English literature major is no one to be taken lightly
or dismissed as some kind of throwback relic.
She is a person who is capable of sustaining attention and learning what
she needs to as her life and career develop.
Baker:
It’s not a waste of a degree.
As long as I have been alive (more than four decades), the knock on liberal arts majors has been in force. I heard it as a student. I hear it as a professor and academic administrator. “It’s great that you love history (or English or philosophy), but what are you going to DO with that?” The answer, based on the results of a study published in the Wall Street Journal, may surprise you. It turns that out that while students who major in a wide variety of professional fields out-earn their liberal arts peers at the outset, the liberal arts majors tend to pull ahead in later years.
How can
this be? The liberal arts major doesn’t
learn a market-driven skill such as nursing or business management. On what basis would they earn more money at
any point in their careers? There are a
variety of answers available, but I would like to focus on one in
particular. By doing so, I think I can
also make a case, not only for liberal arts majors, but also for strengthening
(rather than cutting or eliminating) the liberal arts core.
The great management theorist Peter Drucker addressed the matter insightfully in his 1957 book Landmarks of Tomorrow (emphasis mine):
Whatever does not add to the capacity for sustained growth of personality or contribution is impractical – and may indeed be deleterious. That this or that subject adds to a man’s ability to get a job, or to do well on his first job, is not irrelevant. But as a measure of the effectiveness of a long-term advanced investment it may be the most impractical yardstick, may indeed cost heavily in terms of the really practical results. The practical test of education in educated society is whether it prepares for the demands of the world fifteen years after graduation. Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined. To be able to do this a man must have learned to learn. He must be conscious of how much there is still to learn. He must acquire basic tools of analysis, of expression, of understanding. Above all he must have the desire for self-development.
The
person who has mastered a particular market-driven skill of today is in a good
position to profit in the short term, but given that we live in a highly
dynamic society, the better long term investment is an education that equips
the person to learn for the rest of his life.
The liberal arts, if taught well and approached with desire by the
student, have the ability to unlock almost any subject the student wishes to
learn for years to come. If you
understand how to think, how to draw lessons from past experience, how to write
and speak, how to calculate, and how to put information through the kinds of
tests which yield knowledge, then you have the tools you need.
2014: A Risky Year in Geopolitics? By Ian Bremmer.
2014: A Risky Year in Geopolitics? By Ian Bremmer. The National Interest, January 29, 2014.
State of the Union: Platitudes of a Post-Imperial Presidency. By Simon Tisdall.
State of the Union: Platitudes of a post-imperial presidency. By Simon Tisdall. The Guardian, January 29, 2014.
Senator Mike Lee Gives the Tea Party Response to the State of the Union.
Tea Party Response to the State of the Union. By Senator Mike Lee. Video. Real Clear Politics, January 28, 2014. YouTube. Text at PolicyMic.
Six reasons why Mike Lee’s tea party response to the State of the Union was amazing. By Patrick Howley. The Daily Caller, January 28, 2014.
Lee:
Today, Americans know in their hearts that something is wrong. Much of what is wrong relates to the sense that the “American Dream” is falling out of reach for far too many of us. We are facing an inequality crisis — one to which the President has paid lip-service, but seems uninterested in truly confronting or correcting.
This
inequality crisis presents itself in three principal forms:
– immobility
among the poor, who are being trapped in poverty by big-government programs;
– insecurity
in the middle class, where families are struggling just to get by and can’t
seem to get ahead;
– and
cronyist privilege at the top, where political and economic insiders twist the
immense power of the federal government to profit at the expense of everyone
else.
To be
fair, President Obama and his party did not create all of these problems. The
Republican Establishment in Washington can be just as out-of-touch as the
Democratic Establishment.
However,
tonight, as on numerous occasions of late, the President’s lofty rhetoric
ignored the fact that his administration continues to leave poor and
middle-class families further behind, while he and his allies insist that the
real problem is “inequality” itself.
But
where does this new inequality come from? From government — every time it takes
rights and opportunities away from the American people and gives them instead
to politicians, bureaucrats, and special interests.
Inequality
– real inequality - is trapping poor children in failing schools to benefit
bureaucrats and union bosses. It’s penalizing low-income parents for getting
married, or getting better jobs.
It’s
guaranteeing insurance companies taxpayer bailouts if Obamacare cuts into their
profits.
Inequality
is blocking thousands of middle-class jobs in the energy industry as a favor to
partisan donors and radical environmental activists.
Inequality
is denying viable, unborn children any protection under the law, while
exempting unsanitary, late-term abortion clinics from basic safety standards.
It’s
denying citizens their right to define marriage in their states as
traditionally or as broadly as their diverse values dictate.
It’s
the federal government hurting rural communities, especially in the west, by
controlling and mismanaging public lands.
It’s
changing laws without congressional approval, and spying on American citizens
without constitutional authority.
And of
course, Obamacare – all by itself – is an inequality Godzilla that has robbed
working families of their insurance, their doctors, their wages and their jobs.
Many Americans are now seeing why some of us fought so hard to stop this
train-wreck over the last four years.
Government-driven
inequality is the reason why, as hard-working families across the country
struggle to make ends meet, six of the ten wealthiest counties in America are
now suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Six reasons why Mike Lee’s tea party response to the State of the Union was amazing. By Patrick Howley. The Daily Caller, January 28, 2014.
Lee:
Today, Americans know in their hearts that something is wrong. Much of what is wrong relates to the sense that the “American Dream” is falling out of reach for far too many of us. We are facing an inequality crisis — one to which the President has paid lip-service, but seems uninterested in truly confronting or correcting.
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