Justice

Paul Newman-from the film The Verdict (1982, directed by Sidney Lumet, script by David Mamet).

You know, so much of the time we’re lost. We say, ‘Please, God, tell us what is right. Tell us what’s true. There is no justice. The rich win, the poor are powerless…’ We become tired of hearing people lie. After a time we become dead. A little dead. We start thinking of ourselves as victims. (pause) And we become victims. (pause) And we become weak…and doubt ourselves, and doubt our institutions…and doubt our beliefs…we say for example, `The law is a sham…there is no law…I was a fool for having believed there was.’ (beat) But today you are the law. You are the law…And not some book and not the lawyers, or the marble statues and the trappings of the court…all that they are is symbols. (beat) Of our desire to be just… (beat) All that they are, in effect, is a prayer…(beat)… a fervent, and a frightened prayer. In my religion we say, `Act as if you had faith, and faith will be given to you.’ (beat) If. If we would have faith in justice, we must only believe in ourselves. (beat) And act with justice. (beat) And I believe that there is justice in our hearts. (beat) Thank you.

Is College Necessary?

Is College Necessary in a Knowledge-Drenched World? By Trent Batson

We talk about "content" as if it's a commodity you can buy on Amazon. We talk about "delivery" as if FedEx could teach the course. We have devalued collaborative work by shouting "plagiarism" if students turn to each other for help or flout copyright laws, therefore leading to the delusion that young learners can (indeed should) learn alone.

If knowledge is just content and all you need to do is deliver it, and there is no social aspect to learning because individuals can learn alone, then of course people ask "Why go to college?" Our making education into a commercial transaction by our ways of referring to education has dug us into a deep hole. We would not have known how deep if the digital revolution hadn't shown us.

Learning is of course not content but a process that engages both teacher and learner, knowledge constantly alters because of that process, and all learning is social. Viewing learning as a social process which engages both teachers and learners makes the why go to college question moot.

9/17/2008

http://campustechnology.com/articles/67620/

From The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

By William Deresiewicz
in American Scholar
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.html


"One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more. The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists. “Work must always be,” Ruskin says, “and captains of work must always be....[But] there is a wide difference between being captains...of work, and taking the profits of it.” "

On Warren G. Harding

As for Warren G. Harding, H.L. Mencken noted, "He wrote the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abyss of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

Poet E.E. Cummings kicked Harding when he was down, way down: "The only man, woman, or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead."