There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted.
—Carl Sandburg
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Category Archives: Education
Words Have Meaning (And That’s Double Plus Ungood)
There’s nothing new in the SJWs’ current attempt to hijack our language by using words in ways that don’t fit their meanings found in common dictionaries. That method of trying to control the parameters of thought and argument was old when Orwell wrote his essay on Newspeak.
Sarah Hoyt has an essay over at PJ Media about her experience with The Semantic Whoredom of the Left. She has an interesting perspective as someone trained in linguistics who is not a native-speaker of English.
But it wasn’t until l’affaire prom dress that I realized it wasn’t just their etymology that was faulty but that these people had in fact built themselves an entirely new language, with words that are in common use, kidnapped, raped, and made to parade in public with disfiguring makeup. Or if you prefer, with words that are in common use voided of their signification, and filled with meanings they were never meant to have, meanings that can only be understood if you share the basic assumptions of leftist liberals.
Also,
It’s quite possible that the true believers are effectively beyond our reach. But we should try to force those who are new converts, freshly spewed from universities where the cult is taught, to unpack their assumptions and confront the real meaning of words.
Making them read dictionary definitions, and a bit of history is a good beginning.
Above all, do not accept their definition. Fight against it. They’re holding perfectly good words captive and making them commit acts against their nature.
And corrupting language is corrupting thought.
Read the whole thing.
They’ve got be be carefully untaught.
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The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things.
—Richard Feynman
You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught
Sean Stevens has a paper posted at Heterodox Academy titled Research Summary: Education is Related to Greater Ideological Prejudice. Here’s the abstract.
Decades of research have shown that education reduces individuals’ prejudices toward people who belong to different groups, but this research has focused predominantly on prejudice toward ethnic/racial groups, immigrant groups, and general nonconformists. However, it is not clear whether education reduces other prejudices against groups along different dimensions, including ideological identification. An analysis of American National Election Studies data from 1964 to 2012 shows that education is related to decreases in interethnic/interracial prejudice, but also to increases in ideological (liberal vs. conservative) prejudice. This finding could not be explained simply by the greater polarization of the American electorate in the past twenty years. The results require rethinking how and why education is associated with reduced prejudice for certain groups but not others.
Read the whole thing.
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I love quotations, because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognizably wiser than oneself.
—Marlene Dietrich
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Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable sub-human who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
—Robert Heinlein
Follow the Money
Recently, there was a disruptive student protest at NYU. National Review reports
NYU administrators showed little patience for the activists disrupting the proceedings at the Kimmel Center for University Life. But how to dissolve the protest? It turned out that there was no need to bring in the police. Ringing up the students’ parents was all it took. The phone calls advised parents that students who interfered with campus functions could be suspended, and that suspensions can carry penalties of revoked financial aid or housing. The students “initially planned to stay indefinitely,” notes the Voice’s report. “Instead, the students departed within forty hours.”
Ka-ching!
Read the whole thing.
