The Meddlesome Priest :

Reaction to the previous post, Plague of Dunces was overwhelming with 12,456 reads to date.  Vivian Sherwood, a dear friend, and Mke Griffin, a former student, suggested publish a post explaining ‘learning how to learn’ and how it actually works in people’s everyday life, how it makes them free. They also suggested I incorporate testimonies from former students who learned how to learn. Ok, Vivian, and Max ! You got it. We start with a definition.       Definition: Learning-how-to-learn is the art of acquiring the skills of logic and using the best available evidence to seek reality, truth, goodness and beauty for the rest of your life. No teachers. No professors. Just You. Then, we add three simple axioms:                              #1.       We need to know the things we don’t know. #2.      We need the sk...

Two Books by Bruce Herschensohn             “If all Americans were like you, America certainly would not perish.”                                     --- Alexander Solzhenitsyn As recent events in the Middle East amply demonstrate, America is not diplomatically, militarily, or morally capable of dealing with the worst threat to world peace since the Cuba missile crisis of the early 1960’s. Forty-seven U.S Senators are accused of meddling in President Obama’s Iran foreign policy. The President himself is accused of doing all he could to unsuccessfully overthrow Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during last week’s election . Snubs and counter-snubs have replaced diplomacy and political consensus. Quite apart from who’s right and who’s wrong, t...

"Political correctness is tyranny with manners. Telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can't be far behind". --- Charlton Heston ( Harvard Law School (1999) [Proposed Saturday Night Live Skit] (ETHNIC STUDIES PROFESSOR) “Officer! Arrest that man…and his kids!” (PC POLICE OFFICER) “Why? What’s he done?” (ETHNIC STUDIES PROFESSOR) He’s letting his kids play cowboys and Indians…wearing feather headdresses, carrying tomahawks, and… OH NO!...building a teepee!  This is an OUTRAGE!” (PC POLICE OFFICER) “What’s wrong with that?” (ETHNIC STUDIES PROFESSOR) “Because he’s anti-essentializing himself through cultural appropriation!” (PC POLICE OFFICER) (…gun drawn, shooting position…)  “WTF! Freeze kids….drop those tomahawks! With headlines around the globe dripping in blood from beheadings, incineration, mass rape, and child mutilation, torture and death, civilian slaughter at museums and...

When Dunces Teach Dunces: American institutions of public higher education should be shut down immediately. They should not re-open until they can do their job; teaching our young 'how' to think, and not 'what' to think. Two radically opposed views on objective truth are struggling for control of American minds in public higher education. Both are defective. One view, championed by Professor Howard Zinn, proposes not only that objective truth is impossible, but that is would be undesirable even if it were possible. The opposing view, championed by Allan Bloom, claims that diversity of opinion does not entail the lack of objective truth. On the contrary, error points to objective truth by enlightened recognition. The stakes are high. What passes for public higher education in America is not working and has no prospect of ever working due to an inherent flaw. It fails to teach students how to learn on their own. American public higher education is both econom...