Sunday's Quote: The conundrum of higher education

Here's more about Mamet

Allen Mendenhall is one of the more refined young thinkers of our time.  A prime exemplar of Libertarianism in its truest form, the well-educated Mendenhall recently featured a piece by The Weekly Standard senior editor Andrew Ferguson highlighting a January 2009 speech at Stanford University by David Mamet, wherein the Pulitzer-winning playwright offered his take on the current state of higher education.  Have a look:

"Higher ed, [Mamet] said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought.  He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food.  A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom — 'Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever' — and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

"'If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we're training ourselves not to see cause and effect,'" he said.  Wasn't there, he went on, a 'much more interesting .  .  . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?'"
– from "Andrew Ferguson on 'Converting Mamet'" at The Literary Order; May 16, 2011

On This Day in History: Those dastardly explorers

A statue of Christopher Columbus in Providence, Rhode Island was found vandalized with red paint yesterday.  For additional effect, a sign that read "murderer" was left hanging around the statue's waist.  Later that day, dueling rallies were held in Boston, about 50 miles from Providence, to celebrate and protest the observance of the Spanish explorer's voyage to the Americas.

Although anti-Columbus sentiment is not new, it has become more virulent.  As school curricula give way to hypersensitivity aimed at national pride, the disregard of other cultural imperfections that are celebrated ad nauseam while concurrently refusing to acknowledge the achievements of both the explorers and Founding Fathers, without whom our greatness would not be possible, is unavoidably conspicuous.  It's also abject hypocrisy.

Aside from Columbus, the following Europeans deserve some degree of recognition and gratitude for their exploration throughout the Americas: John Cabot (c. 1497, via England), Alonso de Ojeda (c. 1499, via Spain, alongside Amerigo Vespucci, after whom America is named), Vicente Yáñez Pinzón (c. 1500, via Spain), Pedro Álvares Cabral (c. 1500, via Portugal), Gaspar Corte-Real (c. 1500, via Spain), Rodrigo de Bastidas (c. 1501, via Spain), Vasco Núñez de Balboa (c. 1513, via Spain), Juan Ponce de León (c. 1513, via Spain) and Juan Díaz de Solís (c. 1516, via Spain).

Now for some history...

1492 – The first expedition led by Christopher Columbus makes landfall for the first time at San Salvador Island in The Bahamas.

1792 – The first celebration of Columbus Day is observed in New York.  It would not become a Federal holiday until 1937.

1793 – The cornerstone of Old East, the oldest building at the oldest State university in the United States, is laid on the campus of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

1870 – General Robert Edward Lee died.  A West Point graduate (class of 1829) and U.S. Army Colonel whom President Lincoln personally chose to quell a certain uprising in the South, Lee is best remembered as both the commanding general of the Confederate Army and one of the greatest of all Americans.

1892 – The Pledge of Allegiance is first recited by students in many public schools throughout the United States as part of a celebration marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage.

1901 – The Executive Mansion is officially renamed "The White House" by President Theodore Roosevelt.

1960 – As both General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Premier of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev infamously pounds his shoe on a desk during an assembly of the United Nations to protest the assertion of colonial policy being conducted by the Soviets throughout eastern Europe.

1972 – En route to the Gulf of Tonkin, a racial brawl involving more than 100 sailors breaks out aboard the USS Kitty Hawk.

1999 – Although its veracity is debatable, "The Day of Six Billion" is commemorated by the United Nations Population Fund as the approximate day on which the number of people in the world reached 6,000,000,000 following the birth of Adnan Nevic in Sarajevo, Bosnia.

2000 – Religion of Peace: The USS Cole (DDG-667), a United States Navy destroyer, is badly damaged in the port of Aden, Yemen by two suicide bombers connected to al-Qaeda, killing 17 and wounding 39.

2002 – Religion of Peace: Terrorists detonate bombs in Kuta, Bali, killing 202 and wounding over 300.

A not-so-Iconic Shot

And remember kids, stay in school...

A stretch of road near Southern Guilford High School in Greensboro, North Carolina.  Similar mistakes have been made somewhat recently in Miami, Florida and Kalamazoo, Michigan.  

Photo by Joseph Rodriguez, via the Associated Press and the Greensboro News & Record

Sunday's Quote: Wisdom

It's Father's Day.  But instead of having a post similar to the one I did for Mother's Day last month, I feel that sharing something else I've been pondering would be in order.

Human nature dictates that we tend to dislike truth.  Indeed militant opposition can seemingly arise out of thin air just for speaking it.  Still anyone who stands for truth is a champion of the proper cause.  Trouble arises most commonly when one uses that truth as a steppingstone to enforce an ulterior motive, and this, to our unmitigated detriment, has become our generally accepted state of affairs.  So let the antagonists say what they wish.  In the end their words are nothing but smoke, which is always the end result of throwing water on fire.

"He who learns must suffer.  Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, and against our will, comes wisdom by the awful grace of God."
-- Aeschylus (c. 525 BC-c. 456 BC), ancient Greek playwright and soldier

Sunday's Quote: Carpe noctem

I've been something of a night owl since my earliest days of college when I was allowed (per my "legal adult" status) to stay up past 10:00 p.m. for the first time.  Sheltered child or not, my new found freedom quickly became an abused privilege.

By age 20, the oncoming threat of an early class at Fogelman with an instructor who had less than a full grasp of our native tongue never once stopped me from staying out past 3:00 a.m. during the week.  So I suppose it's little wonder that my occupation over the previous five years doesn't get started until well after the Sun has set.

Entrained circadian rhythms became the main side effect of many late nights and early mornings that go back nearly a decade and a half.  Yet the opportunity afforded by these odd hours, if only to think and process a considerable variety of thoughts, has proven a blessing in disguise that has led, in part, to posts like the one being read right now.

Even when not at work, maintaining these hours in my personal life also allows for the embellishment of an increasing desire for aloneness.  Although I am anything but a hermit, I have become, nevertheless, an undependable social commitment with those for whom I was once automatic.  Instead of showing up as expected, I am now more likely to jump in my ride with a fully charged iPod and drive for hours, oftentimes ending up in different counties and even States (Arkansas and Mississippi).  Perhaps the quotes below explain why.

"When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign is Solitude."
-- from the fourth chapter of William Wordsworth's "The Prelude"

"Solitude offers a double advantage to the thinker: the first in being with himself, the second in not being with others."
-- François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), French writer and philosopher better known by the pen name, Voltaire

Seize the night indeed.

("Unsilent Night" © Dallas Observer, December 2009)

On This Day in History: April 23

1635: The first public school in the United States, Boston Latin School, is founded in Boston, Massachusetts.  In 2007 the school was named one of the top twenty high-schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report.

1910: Theodore Roosevelt made his "The Man in the Arena" speech at the University of Paris in France.  Later re-printed in his book Citizenship in a Republic, a notable portion was spoken by our 26th President as follows --

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

1948: In a key battle, a major port in Israel called Haifa is captured from Arab forces during this particular Arab-Israeli War (of which there have been at least six).  Israel's decisive victory 11 months later led to the 1949 Armistice Agreements that established boundaries between Israel and the West Bank.  "The Green Line," as it was called, would hold for 18 years.

1985: Coca-Cola releases the ill-fated "New Coke."  After a promising start, public response becomes acutely negative.  In fact many Southerners who consider the drink a part of their regional identity viewed Coca-Cola's decision to change the flavor as another surrender to the Yankees.  Ultimately the original formula is returned to the market in less than 3 months.

1988: Pink Floyd's album, The Dark Side of the Moon, leaves the charts for the first time after spending a record of 741 consecutive weeks (over 14 years) on the Billboard 200.

1997: Attackers armed with knives, sabers, and guns killed 42 men, women, and children in the Algerian village of Omaria.  One report told of a pregnant woman whose unborn baby was literally ripped from her body and hacked apart.  Called "Islamic terrorists" by the U.S. State Department, these like-minded aggressors were responsible for 13 declared massacres in Algeria for the year.

2009: A gamma ray burst, labeled "GRB 090423," is observed for 10 seconds near the constellation Leo by the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission satellite.  To date over 500 GRBs have been detected, but the first one is still recognized as both the most distant object of any kind and the oldest known object in the universe.