The Miseducation of America

"The truth is, there are powerful forces at work in our society that are actively hostile to the college ideal. That distrust critical thinking and deny the proposition that democracy necessitates an educated citizenry. That have no use for larger social purposes. That decline to recognize the worth of that which can’t be bought or sold. Above all, that reject the view that higher education is a basic human right."

The Miseducation of America - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Have you tried taking long walks?"

If I ever get my philosophical counselor's license I'll hang this over the couch.

Hope commences in heartbreak

Proving that optimism need not be pie-eyed or uninformed or stupid, a reverse mirror-image of pessimism... They're really talking about meliorism. And doing it.

Never enough time for all the nothing

We all have too much "nothing" to do, to wait for the Saturday solstice to get on with summer.

We must SIT, to think?!

I've found my bete noire. He's The Thinker.

The specific association of philosophy with walking, which features so prominently in Gros’s book, is itself a middle-sized thought worth looking at a little harder. We call Aristotle’s philosophical school Peripatetic because legend holds that he liked to walk about as he lectured, but the name may simply be a corruption of the school’s original nickname, derived from the peripatoi, or colonnades, of the Athenian Lyceum. Aristotle’s fondness for travel—born in Stagira, he was an outsider in Athens who ventured away on numerous occasions, most famously to tutor the truculent Alexander the Great—may also have been a factor. There is no internal evidence that his ideas are rooted in walking, except in the general sense that he believed in observation of the natural world as a prerequisite for science.

Even solitary philosophizing may prove less amenable to the stroll than we often imagine...

We must eventually cease walking, if we are truly to think." 

Challenge accepted. I'm going to go walking, to think about that.

Bright Stroll, Big City - The Chronicle of Higher Education