So, yes, I have removed myself from the New-Agey circle of desks in the middle of the classroom and gone back to the lectern—and it feels good. It’s where I belong. believe, in the long run, my students will benefit, too, as over time I wean them from the spoon-feeding we have all been doing during the pandemic.
The tranquil tropical town which has restarted whipping kids is Puducherry (India): “H3N2 outbreak: This UT shuts schools from 16-24 March.” In a normal world, people should not ask for evidence to not whip kids to ostensibly prevent future tempests. Regardless, there is a mountain of scientific evidence that whipping kids has no effect on tempests.
As opposed to fifty years ago, today’s protesting students do not exhibit an instinctive aversion to authority. With each controversy, they join the country’s most powerful forces in calling for more censorship, fewer civil liberties, and less tolerance for dissenting viewpoints.
Most of all, this system benefits the people in charge, who maintain the status quo through the politics of personal destruction. The school serves as an incubator for the unimpressive rulers of tomorrow. Some classmates will go on to serve the party line in Congress, others as bureaucrats, and many more as faceless defenders of Wall Street. No matter where they land, they’ll internalize the dogma of Georgetown Law.
Out of these early universities was born the concept of liberal arts — grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy — studies which are “liberal” not because they are easy or unserious, but because they are suitable for those who are free (liberalis), as opposed to slaves or animals. In the era before SME’s (subject matter experts), these are the subjects thought to be essential preparation for becoming a good, well-informed citizen who is an effective participant in public life.
Even with the pandemic clearly over, the FDA continues to issue emergency-use authorizations for COVID-19 vaccines and tests. We have no idea what any of this means for college mandates, but we do know that after three long years, we have had enough. Students and parents will no longer be silenced. If college bureaucrats aren’t willing to end their reckless and outdated COVID-19 policies now, parents will shift their support to colleges that do.
The destruction of Roald Dahl’s books is yet another sign of the all-pervasive negation of reality we now face. We see this negation all around us, in literature, history, politics, economics, even in the sciences. Objective reality gives way to subjective experience, emotions, or preferences in place of what is true.
The Negation of Reality in Roald Dahl’s Literary Classic Read More
For questioning Covid restrictions, Georgetown Law suspended me from campus, forced me to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, required me to waive my right to medical confidentiality, and threatened to report me to state bar associations. The Dean of Students claimed that I posed a “risk to the public health” of the University, but I quickly learned that my crime had been heretical, not medical.
We could all look back and observe that March 2020 marked the beginning of the end of the great Progressive experiment in public education. Something else is emerging now. This is not a story that any responsible person would have scripted but the end result, and despite all the carnage along the way, might be a better overall system for the next generation of students, parents, and teachers.
On January 25, 2023, Ghent University banned the use of my book The Psychology of Totalitarianism in the course “Critique of Society and Culture”. That happened in the aftermath of a media storm that erupted in September 2022 following my interviews with Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. I already wrote about that in a previous essay.
People often ask me why I still care about school closures and other covid restrictions that harmed a generation of children. “Schools are open now,” they say. “It’s enough already.” No. It’s not. The impact to this generation of children continues. And so do many of the restrictions impacting young people.
Academia was full of eccentric professors with various crazy ideas and habits (some brilliant), naïve students, and pompous administrators; but they all adhered to the same standard of knowledge. This led not just to scientific discovery and technological progress, but to every other kind of progress: economic, political, social, and ethical.
