The responsibility for being a real person instead of an economic zombie-drone whose raison d’être is employment by and for the system and its goal of indefinite self-perpetuation lies entirely on you. Only you can wake up. The organs of the American Nightmare can’t and won’t do it for you, and this includes the colleges, including, increasingly, the liberal arts ones.
Tag: college
Recommended Reading 7
This week’s collection of recommended articles, essays, blog posts, and (as always) an interesting video or two, covers economic collapse and cultural dystopia; the question of monetary vs. human values; the ubiquity of disinformation in America and the accompanying need for true education of the deeply humanizing sort; the ongoing debate over climate change and…
Recommended Reading 4
In this week’s roundup of recommended reading: various developments in the ongoing global economic collapse, more dystopian/totalitarian trends, the problem with America’s enduring attitude of techno-worship, the crisis in America’s education system, an earthshaking religious discovery in the Middle East, Dan Simmons on the creative daemon muse, and the imminent promise of true cinematic brilliance…
Recommended Reading 3
Topics this week include imperial and economic collapse, the true value of a college education, our troubled shift from physical to digital media, the nature of consciousness, a mysterious marine mammal die-off, the nature and quirks of the human religious instinct, and a new UFO documentary.
From Google’s “in-house philosopher,” a beautiful credo in defense of studying the humanities
Here at The Teeming Brain I’ve gone on at some length about the disastrous/dystopian trends in contemporary American education, including, especially, the rise of the techno-corporate consumer model that assigns a purely economic raison d’etre to higher education. (See, for example, my “America’s Colleges at a Crossroads” series and additional articles.) Today I’m fascinated, and…
Listen up, kids: More college DOES NOT equal more money
Diane Auer Jones, who in addition to being the president of the education-oriented policy institute Washington Campus is a former assistant secretary for postsecondary education in the U.S. Department of Education, recently wrote a blog post for The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Brainstorm blog (“Straddling 2 Centuries,” April 29) that should be required reading for…
The last generation’s successes become the next generation’s problems
An interesting recent article from The Chronicle of Higher Education that explains one effect of California’s epic budget crisis on its college system spells out a principle with much wider applications for our culture and civilization at large. “California’s ‘Gold Standard’ for Higher Education Falls Upon Hard Times” (June 15) explains how the fabled California…
America’s Colleges at a Crossroads – Part 3
You might want to catch up on Parts 1 and 2 of this series before reading this final installment, although this one, like the others, can stand on its own. In the first post in this series, I talked about the economic crisis that will force and is currently forcing the realignment and, in many…
America’s Colleges at a Crossroads – Part 2
If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, you might want to go back and catch up before reading this one. Trashing education A few weeks ago I posted a link to the article that forms the backbone of part one of this series — which, again, is “A Straight-Talk Survival Guide for Colleges” by Peter…
America’s Colleges at a Crossroads – Part 1
This is the first of a three-part series. (Also see parts 2 and 3.)In this post I’ll simply point to the problem and refer to a couple of recently published pieces that lay it out in bleak detail. In the next two, to be published over the course of this week, I’ll lay out some…