"This should be basic teaching for school children. And their teachers..."

"Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification."

~ Ayn Rand from 'Galt's Speech' in her book For the New Intellectual

"What is the actual structure of human reasoning when we engage in deduction?"

~ Leonard Peikoff from Lecture 15 of his lecture series 'History of Philosophy'

"To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

"Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.
...

"The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it. . . .

"The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature."

~ Ayn Rand from 'Galt's Speech' in her book For the New Intellectual

[Hat tip Louise LaMontagne]

"Underneath all the pretence, that is what Christmas does celebrate."

"Life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate — and really, underneath all the pretence, that is what it does celebrate."

~ philosopher Leonard Peikoff from his timeless article 'Christmas Should Be More Commercial'

Why Johnny isn't Reading [updated]

We all know that many students emerge from universities knowing less than they did when they entered; graduating with heads full of random, un-integrated bites of information, and arguments they’re aware (deep down) they’ve never really mastered. 

We know you can leave today's universities without every having heard of the giants of your own field; that you can be given an economics degree having never read (or read of) Adam Smith; or an architecture degree without ever getting to grips with Frank Lloyd Wright; or a philosophy degree without ever even encountering, or wrestling with Aristotle.

But it gets worse. More and more young people "just don’t want to read books any more: they seem to lack either the will or the attention span."

"If you’ve been teaching at the [university]  level for a number of years," says the Atlantic in a long piece on the distressing development, "and your teaching involves reading books, you’ll have noticed the phenomenon." I have. Even fourteen years ago it was evident.

Economist George Reisman used to reckon that graduates in any discipline should really emerge possessing 

the essential content of well over a hundred major books on mathematics, science, history, literature, and philosophy, and do so in a form that is well organised and integrated, so that he can apply this internalised body of knowledge to his perception of everything in the world around him. He should be in a position to enlarge his knowledge of any subject and to express his thoughts on any subject clearly and logically, both verbally and in writing. Yet, as the result of the mis-education provided today, it is now much more often the case that college graduates fulfil the Romantic ideal of being ‘simple, uneducated men.’” [Emphasis mine.]

This is everywhere. As the Atlantic recounts, 

students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. .... Many students no longer arrive at [university]—even at highly selective, elite [universities]—prepared to read books.

The Spectator and Daily Skeptic tell a similar tale. The problem starts even earlier than university.

[A] student told [one uni lecturer] that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Hard to study literature if you've never read a book. And can't. 

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

The result:

Students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. ...; students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of [one] English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

A sonnet is only fourteen lines!

The problem is said to be the internet.

Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

But "teenagers are not bothering with the internet either."

They don’t want to know that much to actually initiate a question of the internet. If pushed, they might ask Alexa at home but they hardly go to the bother of typing out a question.
    And this, I have finally worked, out is the reason for teenagers’ disinterest in the possibilities of the internet: the current generation of children are passive users, not active ones. They look at their phones and entertainment is presented to them via their specific feeds: reems and reems of the stuff on Snap or TikTok. Teenagers have no need to actively look for anything, as everything has already been perfectly curated for their specific needs (generally beauty for girls, fitness and jokes for boys – disappointing but there it is). Internet use is a bit like reading a magazine of old, someone else has done all the hard work for you and all you have to do is sit back and scroll. ... 

[F]or the vast majority of children, the internet is as ignored and unvisited as the libraries and bookshops of old.

 So perhaps the problem is not that regular whipping boy. Perhaps the problem is that generations of children — teachers of the teachers of the teachers of today's teachers — have been taught dis-integrated knowledge; that facts are negotiable; that the author is dead; that creators are hegemonic; and that the oceans are boiling and colonial settlement is necessarily genocidal. The hierarchy of knowledge is routinely ignored (or entirely unknown), and teachers increasingly see themselves as agents of social and political change instead of what they once were: teachers. 

Is it then any surprise, after decades of this intellectual rot emanating from philosophy departments and then teachers colleges — a result of the long 'progressive' march through the institutions —that we're not overwhelmingly seeing strong, healthy, confident, independent and knowledgeable young folk, but too many who can't write, can't read, and can't think? 

How to solve this?

Start by burning to the ground the teachers colleges from whence this poison emanates. (Or at least close them). And insist that teachers know their goddamn subject. Philosopher Leonard Peikoff is a strong advocate of this policy to fix Why Johnny Can't Think:

There is no rational purpose to these institutions (and so they do little but disseminate poisonous ideas). Teaching is not a skill acquired through years of classes; it is not improved by the study of “psychology” or “methodology” or any of the rest of the stuff the schools of education offer. Teaching requires only the obvious: motivation, common sense, experience, a few good books or courses on technique, and, above all, a knowledge of the material being taught. Teachers must be masters of their subject; this — not a degree in education — is what school boards should demand as a condition of employment.
    This one change would dramatically improve the schools. If experts in subject matter were setting the terms in the classroom, some significant content would have to reach the students, even given today’s dominant philosophy. In addition, the basket cases who know only the Newspeak of their education professors would be out of a job, which would be another big improvement.
    This reform, of course, would be resisted to the end by today’s educational establishment, and could hardly be achieved nationally without a philosophic change in the country. But it gives us a starting point to rally around that pertains specifically to the field of education. If you are a parent or a teacher or merely a concerned taxpayer, you can start the battle for quality in education by demanding loudly — even in today’s corrupt climate — that the teachers your school employs know what they are talking about, and then talk about it.
    “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . .” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.” 
    Let us fight to make our schools once again bastions of knowledge. Then no dictator can rise among us by counting, like Big Brother in 1984, on the enshrinement of ignorance.
    And then we may once again have a human future ahead of us.

 UPDATE:

At least one youngster is fighting back. On the tech front, at least.

And one school. On the philosophical front.

Reason v Force

 

“If men uphold reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude that men should deal with one another as free agents, settling their disputes by an appeal to the mind, i.e., by a process of voluntary, rational persuasion. If men reject reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude the opposite: that men have no way to deal with one another at all—no way except physical force, wielded by an elite endowed with an allegedly superior, mystic means of cognition.”

~ philosopher Leonard Peikoff from his book The Ominous Parallels

 

"Justice consists first not in condemning, but in admiring..."

"Justice consists first not in condemning, but in admiring -- and then in expressing one's admiration explicitly and in fighting for those one admires....
    “It is, if anything, more important to praise and reward the good than to condemn the evil. To speak up and to fight for the men who are right and who represent rational values.
    “Granted, the evil must be fought and condemned … but then, brushed aside.
    “What counts in life … and this is the issue, of course, of the potency of virtue … what counts in life is the good.
    “They are the men who create the values life requires. They are the men mankind relies on. They are the men whose virtues and achievements must be acknowledged above all, if justice is a virtue, and if life is the standard.
    “So it is important to tell Plato, for instance, that he's wrong. But it is more important that Aristotle hear somebody who recognizes that he is right.
    “It's important that James Taggart not get away with the fraud that he runs Taggart Transcontinental, but it is more important that Rearden find someone who can understand what he is achieving.
    “The first duty of justice is to acknowledge and defend the good.
    “And in this respect, I might point out the whole of 'Atlas Shrugged' is a passionate act of justice.”

~ Leonard Peikoff, composite quote from his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand and lecture 'Objectivism and the Moral Foundations of Government' [hat tips Felipe Lapyda and Robert Nasir]

"The anti-abortionists’ claim to being 'pro-life' is a classic Big Lie."

'Flaming June' by Frederick Leighton

"[Nearly [fif]ty years after Roe V. Wade, no one defends the right to abortion in fundamental, moral terms, which is why the pro-abortion rights forces are on the defensive.
    "Abortion-rights advocates should not cede the terms 'pro-life' and 'right to life' to the anti-abortionists. It is a woman’s right to her life that gives her the right to terminate her pregnancy.
    "Nor should abortion-rights advocates keep hiding behind the phrase 'a woman’s right to choose'” Does she have the right to choose murder? That’s what abortion would be, if the fetus were a person.
    "The status of the embryo in the first trimester is the basic issue that cannot be sidestepped. The embryo is clearly pre-human; only the mystical notions of religious dogma treat this clump of cells as constituting a person.
    "We must not confuse potentiality with actuality.... That tiny growth, that mass of protoplasm, exists as a part of a woman’s body. It is not an independently existing, biologically formed organism, let alone a person. That which lives within the body of another can claim no right against its host. Rights belong only to individuals, not to collectives or to parts of an individual.
    "('Independent' does not mean self-supporting–a child who depends on its parents for food, shelter, and clothing, has rights because it is an actual, separate human being.)
    "'Rights,' in Ayn Rand’s words, 'do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born.'
    "It is only on this base that we can support the woman’s political right to do what she chooses in this issue. No other person–not even her husband–has the right to dictate what she may do with her own body. That is a fundamental principle of freedom....
    "Abortions are private affairs and often involve painfully difficult decisions with life-long consequences. But, tragically, the lives of the parents are completely ignored by the anti-abortionists. Yet that is the essential issue. In any conflict it’s the actual, living persons who count, not the mere potential of the embryo....
    "The anti-abortionists’ attitude, however, is: 'The actual life of the parents be damned! Give up your life, liberty, property and the pursuit of your own happiness.
    "Sentencing a woman to sacrifice her life to an embryo is not upholding the 'right-to-life.'
    "The anti-abortionists’ claim to being 'pro-life' is a classic Big Lie. You cannot be in favour of life and yet demand the sacrifice of an actual, living individual to a clump of tissue.
    "Anti-abortionists are not lovers of life–lovers of tissue, maybe. But their stand marks them as haters of real human beings."

          ~ philosopher Leonard Peikoff, from his article 'Abortion Rights are Pro-Life'

The concept of 'force' is widely misused and misunderstood today....

"The concept of 'force' ... is widely misused today....
    "Physical force is coercion exercised by physical agency, such as, among many other examples, by punching a man in the face, incarcerating him, shooting him, or seizing his property [it is is physical contact with the person or property of another without his consent and/or the threat of such contact]....
    "There is only one way to attempt to force a man s mind: by directing the force to his body (or property).... A volitional being, left unmolested, is free to initiate a cognitive process. He can struggle to untangle his confusions and replace them ultimately with truth. The only kind of 'social pressure' that cannot be resisted bv intellectual means is the kind that does not rely on intellectual means. If some group, governmental or private, tells a man: 'Either you agree with us or we will clean out your bank account, break your legs, kill you,' then a cognitive process on his part is ineffective; no such process avails in counteracting the threat. This, this category of threat or harm—physical force and nothing else—is what constitutes coercion. This is what sweeps into the discard the victim’s mind....

    "Coercion is not coextensive with frustration caused by others. It pertains only to those frustrations that men cause by invoking the methods of brutality...."

          ~ Leonard Peikoff, from his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand 

 

Christmas: It's thanks to capitalism

"Thanks to capitalism, there was enough wealth to make gifts possible, a great productive apparatus to advertise them and make them available cheaply, and a country so content that men wanted to reach out to their friends and express their enjoyment of life."

~ philosopher Leonard Peikoff, from his op-ed 'Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial'

"Integrity is the principle of being principled..."

"Integrity is the principle of being principled, practicing what one preaches regardless of emotional or social pressure, and not allowing any irrational consideration to overwhelm one's rational condition."

~ Thomas Becker, from his article 'Integrity in Organisations: Beyond Honesty and Conscientiousness,' paraphrasing Leonard Peikoff (p. 242)

Quotes of the Day: On the separation of school & state [updated]

"The Government knows Maori and Pacific achievement is abysmal, a stain on the promise of opportunity for all, but they are so focused on helping the unions they have forgotten about the 1500 kids whose lives are being turned around by Partnership Schools. ... Today’s announcement on Partnership Schools shows the juvenile and callous nature of a Government led by ex-student politicians."
~ David Seymour

"Labour is putting politics, and paying back teacher unions, before the needs of pupils.
"All the schools, their staff and most importantly their pupils face uncertainty and the knowledge they could be axed at the whim of the minister.
"He might give Davis and Jackson some wriggle room by renaming three schools to allow them to continue, but what about the other schools and more importantly the pupils who are succeeding after failing at conventional schools?"
~ blogger HomePaddock

"I want every child in [the country], especially the children of the poor, to be able to go to a better school than they do today. And I think separation is the way to do it."
~ Marshall Fritz

"Quite the opposite of feeding inquiry, the true purpose of state schooling, easily established by reading the words of its founders, was always control. The common school removed from discussion many aspects previously universally inseparable from the project of acquiring an education. Compulsion government schooling was never a mechanism of defending freedom but one of truncating it."
~ Alan Schaeffer

"It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance, and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."
~ Alan Shanker, late president, American Federation of Teachers

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body."
~ John Stuart Mill

"Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to 'educate the people' so that they will have but one common mind to delude... Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the ... people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system."
~ publisher & author Richard Mitchell

"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. ... Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy; these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another. ... Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory."
~ award-winning teacher John Taylor Gatto

"The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense."
~ writer G.K. Chesterton

"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening."
~ US Commissioner of Education Willliam T. Harris

"In all countries, in all centuries, the primary reason for government to set up schools is to undermine the politically weak by convincing their children that the leaders are good and their policies are wise."
~ Marshall Fritz

"If it's wrong, and it is, for the government to intrude into the churches of our nation, to reshape and affect their basic doctrine and teaching, then it is just as wrong for that same government to be the sponsor of the worldview and values of 90 percent of all our nation' s children. - Joel Belz

"If it would be wrong for the government to adopt an official religion, then, for the same reasons, it would be wrong for the government to adopt official education policies. The moral case for freedom of religion stands or falls with that for freedom of education. A society that champions freedom of religion but at the same time countenances state regulation of education has a great deal of explaining to do."
~ philosopher James Otteson

"The more subsidised it is, the less free it is. What is known as "free education" is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; ... and cannot possibly be separated from political control."
~ writer Frank Chodorov

"Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."
~ former British PM Benjamin Disraeil

"It is out of character for [any] country that prides itself on intellectual freedom to put the education of its young in the hands of the state."
~ writer David Kelley

"Don't wait for the perfect moment to break free -- there isn't any. Don't let officials, relatives or anyone else intimidate you into sacrificing your children. If you want to help public schools, give them your money, give them your time, give them your house and your car -- but don't give them your kids. There's a world of support out there for home schoolers. If you can't home school, find a decent private school and sacrifice for your kids' education like you would for that fancy car you want or that vacation or entertainment centre or big house. Whatever you'd sacrifice for the thing you most want in life, sacrifice ten times as much for your children."
~ Tammy Drennan

"The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents."
~ G.K. Chesterton

And finally,

"Only a system of state-controlled schools can be free to teach whatever the welfare of the State may demand."
~ former American educator Elwood Chubberly

FURTHER READING:

• "To achieve [the necessary educational revolution] would be a monumental job, which would take decades. A part of the job, I want to recommend one specific step to improve our schools: close down the teachers colleges.
  "There is no rational purpose to these institutions (and so they do little but disseminate poisonous ideas). Teaching is not a skill acquired trough years of [these] classes ... Teachers must be masters of their subject; this -- not a degree in education -- is what school boards [and parents] should demand as a condition of employment.
  "This one change would dramatically improve the schools. If experts in subject matter were setting the terms in the classroom, some significant content would have to reach the students, even given today's dominant philosophy. In addition, the basket cases who know only the Newspeak of their education lecturers would be out of a job, which would be another big improvement.
  "This reform, of course, would be resisted to the end by today's educational establishment ..."
  Why Johnny Can't Think - Leonard Peikoff, AYN RAND CAMPUS
• "If formal, reality-oriented, intellectual education is an 'imposition' on childhood, it is an imposition that has long since been removed. "
  The False Promise of Classical Education - Lisa Van Damme, OBJECTIVE STANDARD

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Quote of the Day: On socialism v fascism

 

"Both Communists and Fascists describe themselves as socialists, since unlimited power over the economy entails unlimited power over everything, and vice versa. Socialism, however, is a narrow term, referring primarily to economics. The broader term, which covers the state’s power over everything, is totalitarianism."
~ Leonard Peikoff, from his book The DIM Hypothesis

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[Hat tip Anoop Verma]

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Quote of the Day: “A picture is not an argument”

“The appeal to pictures [or YouTube videos or ‘memes’] as the standard of truth is omnipresent in our society ...
    “Is abortion murder?  Does a foetus have rights? Watch the [movie] 'Silent Scream,' the 'picturists' on the religious right advise: See the foetus actively being dismembered ...  After that, who needs an abstract disussion of rights? ...
    “Should American troops enter Somalia [or Iraq? Or Syria]?  Let the TV networks show emaciated children dying of hunger.  Should American troops leave Somalia [or Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Or Libya?] Let the networks show the naked corpse of an American soldier [or ambassador] being dragged through the streets by the natives.  (Thanks to picturism, we now have foreign policy decided in essence by TV producers.)
    “[Equally: Should the west admit refugees escaping murderous civil war in Syria? Let the TV networks and Facebook posters show a drowned child face down on a Mediterannean beach.  Should the west refuse entry? Let the internet warriors show a horde of single Muslim men entering Europe by train. (Thanks to picturism, we now have foreign policy decided in essence by TV producers, Facebook memes and internet warriors.)] …
    “I hold that the picturist method of resolving disputes is espistemologically corrupt; .... it makes reaching a conclusion on a contested subject not easier, but literally impossible.
    “I do not object to pictures used merely as illustrations, after it has been made clear that the pictures have no evidentiary significance.  What I object to is pictures used cognitively, in an abstract discussion, i.e., pictures used to try to solve, or even help solve, a problem in philosophy or politics.  A picture used in such a manner represents the antithesis of thought, of logic, of rational argument.
    “To understand why, ask yourself what such a picture does to the viewer's mind. ... In epistemological terms it causes you to drop the context. In  other words, the picture seduces you into responding to a concrete example while blithely ignoring all of the surrounding information that would enable you to interpret the picture rationally. ...
    “’Picturism’ is a form of epistemological manipulation of the viewer. He is inveigled into turning his mind passively to an isolated segment of a complex issue, which deflects him from the total.  ...
    “Pictures, let me say, can sometimes be a necessary part of a process of cognition.  The proper pattern here is the one laid down in our courtrooms.  Take the O. J. Simpson case .... In legal terms, the pictures were probative. .... In dramatic contrast to a murder trial, the issues which people dispute in philosophy and politics always involve broad generalizations or principles; ....  In philosophy and politics, a picture is always prejudicial, never probative.  The picture offers perceptual data only .... ”
~ Leonard Peikoff, from his talk ‘A Picture is Not an Argument’

Quote of the Day: “…the application of logic to experience.”

 

“Any theory that propounds an opposition between the logical and the empirical, represents a failure to grasp the nature of logic and its role in human cognition. Man’s knowledge is not acquired by logic apart from experience or by experience apart from logic, but by the application of logic to experience. All truths are the product of the logical identification of the facts of experience.”
~ Leonard Peikoff (Source: Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand. Chapter: ‘The Analytic Synthetic Dichotomy’, Page 112)

[Hat tip Anoop Verma]