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.

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.

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.

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.

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):

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.

 

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.

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.