Philosophy for Children, again

It's been about 4 months since the last blog entry, and the only thing worth blogging about at this point is Philosophy for Children (P4C) and getting this implemented ASAFP, ffs already.  I will say it yet again: this is far and away the biggest no-brainer of all-time, the most humane and cost-effective solution to humanity's solvable problems.

(The only rule I would impose on this is: steelman (the opposite of strawman) or penalty.  Synonyms for steelmanning include: Ideological Turing Test; Rapoport-Dennett Rules; Mill's learning the other side - all necessary for doing dialectic well.  About damn time that Ayn Rand got fair treatment from the next generation of philosophers, amiright?)  Perhaps a fun and compelling mantra might be developed, such as: All Steelmanning All the Time.

I'm an imperfect researcher.  I've posted numerous links to many resources on this before - but not perhaps the best resource of all, direct video evidence of children involved in philosophy discussions.  So here is the search link: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=philosophy+for+children%2Clong .  Here are the top results:

Aiming higher: Aristotle for kids?  After all, the better the philosophy, the better the living.

[Addendum: Again, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on P4C: "Nevertheless, because they lack background in the formal study of philosophy, many teachers are reluctant to encourage the philosophical thinking of their students. Their fears, however, are exaggerated. Familiarity with some of the standard philosophical literature might be desirable, but it is not necessary for bringing Philosophy for Children into the classroom. What is required is the ability to facilitate philosophical discussion. For this, it is much more important that teachers have some philosophical curiosity themselves than a familiarity with academic philosophical literature. Like their students, teachers unfamiliar with the discipline of philosophy may nevertheless have an aptitude for philosophical thinking—or at least a knack for recognizing when others are engaged in philosophical thought." UP comments: And if both teachers and kids are capable of such thought, then why not Philosophy for Everyone? It only stands to reason.]

A simple either-or-or (re "educators" and "white privilege")

Say that caucasian students in America are brought up in the classroom from First Grade onward to acknowledge and make confessions of their "white privilege."  Can this be expected to:

(1) Improve educational outcomes, create better learners/knowers and more thoughtful citizens, etc.
(2) Have deleterious effects on educational outcomes
(3) Have little to no effect either way

"Progressive educators" are in effect staking their reputations on (1).  Are these "progressive educators" nearly as bright and morally advanced as they evidently think they are?  Why are they pushing this whole "white privilege" narrative on their impressionable captive audience when they could be advancing the no-brainer Philosophy for Children agenda, instead (or at the least in addition to the "white privilege" crap which is a transparent effort by the left to cover for half a century of cultural and policy failings)?

I, for one, would love to see empirical data on the effects of the "white privilege" crap and the whole cluster of related dogmas and associated Newspeak, etc., on educational outcomes.  The "educators" should be more than willing to subject their programs to such empirical scrutiny, or else they wouldn't be very honorable or credible, now, would they.

They should also be more than willing to show how all that additional student loan and other taxpayer money being poured into the "education" system to (e.g.) better bureaucratically administer all this crap, leads to outcomes per dollar worth all that extra expense.

Otherwise, aren't they (as I have come increasingly to suspect) basically caught dead to rights parasitically and hubristically sucking off a surplus from the taxpayer in order to promote easily discredited, toxic af, ideologically-inbred leftist crap?

The likes of AOC are not a positive educational outcome, BTW.

Am I missing anything here?

I'm going with (2).  Have you seen the shitshow that has resulted from the "educators" doing their thing up until now, much less going forward?  If you haven't seen it, have you been in a cave?

[Addendum: on what planet is it to be expected that a recent "cutting edge" measure, the removal of the mural at the George Washington school in San Francisco, will lead to better outcomes, much less avoid worse ones?  The only "lesson" I see being imparted to (i.e., indoctrinated into) the students is that it is okay to feel "harmed" by exposure to history and artworks.  No, this story isn't satire, unfortunately; these "educators" in all their cult-like moral fervor are actually behaving this fucking stupidly.  See the "inbred" link above for more madness in the same vein.]

Ideological inbreeding isn't progressive

How far today's most-unimpressive American left has fallen since the days of a true progressive like the philosopher John Stuart Mill.  The spectacle today is one of a bunch of hubris-filled folks refusing to take the ideas/arguments of non-lefties seriously, usually because they have a lousy grasp of what the non-lefties advocate.  (See the preceding Mill link; as one glaring instance, lefties today are utterly awful and deranged when it comes to accurately depicting the views of Atlas Shrugged's author.)  You can't blame the "increasingly business-like models" of the universities as they cater to "woke" customer-students, as anti-market leftists try to rationalize it; since how did those students get "woke" in the first place?  Via the non-business-like public schools, run by "educators" with predominantly left-wing ideological frameworks (and this goes also for tenured university professors who aren't so beholden to the universities' bottom lines).

I've written previously about a San Francisco school board choosing to waste $600K on removing a "harmful" mural depicting history.  (Should the school fall short by $600K for genuinely educational purposes sometime in the future, they shall elicit no sympathy whatsoever from this commonsense blogger.)  To the irredeemable deplorables in flyover country clinging bitterly to their guns and bibles, that sounds pretty idiotic if not bewildering, but it's all too clear that the left-inbreeders don't care what those outsiders think.

Now we get more along the same lines: When the Culture War Comes for the Kids.  (Tucker Carlson discussed some main points of this article on his show yesterday, but my attention was drawn to this Atlantic piece by Google News, of which I am a regular user.)  This piece details the way in which, since roughly 2014, the "educators" have made a fervent effort to systematically degrade and ultimately destroy the NYC public school system in the name of, you guessed it, "diversity" and its cluster of associated "progressive" values.  They have gotten really obnoxious about it, too.  For instance, without informing parents, the "educators" removed the "Boys" and "Girls" signs from the bathrooms, leading to unpleasantness for the students who eventually went back to using the bathrooms they used before.  (After the parents found out, the school had to come up with a better solution.  "After six months of stalemate, the Department of Education intervened: One bathroom would be gender-neutral."  Gee, these progressive woke geniuses charged with "educating" the kids couldn't figure out such a common sense solution on their own?)

This paragraph in particular caught my eye:

But the country’s politics had changed dramatically during our son’s six years of elementary school. Instead of hope pendants around the necks of teachers, in one middle-school hallway a picture was posted of a card that said, “Uh-oh! Your privilege is showing. You’ve received this card because your privilege just allowed you to make a comment that others cannot agree or relate to. Check your privilege.” The card had boxes to be marked, like a scorecard, next to “White,” “Christian,” “Heterosexual,” “Able-bodied,” “Citizen.” (Our son struck the school off his list.) This language is now not uncommon in the education world. A teacher in Saratoga Springs, New York, found a “privilege-reflection form” online with an elaborate method of scoring, and administered it to high-school students, unaware that the worksheet was evidently created by a right-wing internet troll—it awarded Jews 25 points of privilege and docked Muslims 50.

If you can't tell the difference between satire and the real thing, that should be cause to reconsider the real thing.

So, how could one tell a satire of today's unhinged American left and Demo rats apart from the real thing?  Apart from having knowledge of their histories, how could one tell idiots like AOC apart from a GOP plant?

As a result of ideological inbreeding, many prominent members of the American left today are lightning quick to identify controversial statements as racist.  It's not enough to oppose racism; you have to agree with them on what qualifies as racism, and you'd better agree pretty quickly, because, well, that's what they're used to getting after all that inbreeding.

(Case in point: Yet Again, Trump Attacks a Prominent Black Journalist.  So who's injecting race into this, and when race is injected into things, isn't that a subtle form of racism?  Headlines like this only prove Trump's (and Trump voters') point.  Anyone with a clue knows by now that Trump could very well attack anyone who isn't part of his own family.  Have you seen how be badmouths numerous former high-level members of his administration?  Nevertheless, he is a very stable genius at selecting high-level officials.  As for the "prominent black journalist" in question, MSDNC's Joy Ann Reid - someone with an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome - she is symptomatic of the badly degraded opinion-quality standards on that channel.)

As you might suppose, I don't like ideological inbreeding wherever it occurs.  I don't like the ideological inbreeding of the George W. Bush years that culminated in the GOP drinking the Sarah Palin Kool-Aid.  (How could you tell either way whether Palin was a plant, absent knowledge of her history?  The parallels between Palin and AOC are quite strong, are they not.)

Fortunately there is a solution to this problem: philosophical education.  Philosophers (the genuine articles, of course, not pseudos) avoid inbreeding by practicing the art of dialectic.  Among human cognitive endeavors, philosophy is as progressive and woke as it gets.

Civic ignorance & jury nullification

"A man I found guilty of dealing drugs died in prison. I wish I could take that verdict back."

By Paul St. Louis
July 9 

Paul St. Louis is a resident of Fairfax County, Va.  

Last spring, I was on a jury that found 37-year-old Frederick Turner guilty of dealing drugs. It wasn’t easy to arrive at this verdict, and the result of our deliberations gave us no pleasure. A few months later, I found out the result of our verdict was worse than I expected: Turner, a meth addict with no prior criminal convictions, received a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years on two counts of having a firearm while dealing drugs. I was astonished; we had no idea that we were sending someone to prison for four decades. Even the man who sentenced Turner — T. S. Ellis III, a no-nonsense judge with more than 30 years on the bench — thought the term was “excessive” and “wrong.” 

Turner lasted less than a year in that prison. On June 13, he was found dead in his cell at the U.S. penitentiary in Florence, Colo., a notoriously dangerous prison. The circumstances of his death are not clear. 

I can’t stop wondering: Why 40 years? And why was this first-time offender, with zero history of violence, sent to one of the most brutal penitentiaries in the country, with a heavy gang presence and minimal staff to manage the extremely dangerous environment?
...
I wasn’t aware of the concept of jury nullification — when a jury finds someone guilty but chooses to acquit because the potential punishment for breaking the law is too harsh. If I could go back in time, and if I knew Turner faced 40 years, I would nullify. The sentence he received was simply unjust.

If you poll Americans on whether they know about jury nullification, the numbers would be appallingly, deplorably low.

Obvious question: why the appalling, deplorable ignorance?  Levels of knowledge or ignorance of jury nullification should be a knock-down, no-brainer litmus test of the quality of civic education in this country.  Someone has really fucked up there, and that someone is probably shifting blame for the problems in this country.

For fuck's sake, already.

The intellectual collapse of the left accelerates further...

As if the massive overwhelming body of evidence of left-wing intellectual collapse accumulating seemingly by the day under my 'democrats' and 'leftist losers' tags wasn't enough, we get this ("Unsafe" 1930s SF school mural to be destroyed).  This is "cutting edge San Francisco values," unchecked, undiluted.  (The school board voted 6-0; the diversity of viewpoint here . . . I don't know how to finish that sentence.)  To borrow wording from my previous post, I believe that, barring some unforeseen (ahem) and revolutionary turn of intellectual events, this collapse is inevitable and irreversible given the widely shared values, assumptions and episteme of left-wingers as they have "evolved" over recent history.  Where is the wisdom in any of this stuff?  My term for this "development": Slow-mo trainwreck. :(

This mural has been up for decades.  Questions: Why only now do the students and/or faculty get around to being "harmed" and "triggered" by the mural?  Would it have anything to do with overwrought "social justice" poison being pumped into their minds in recent years?  If they're "harmed" and "triggered" by this, how wimpy are these "educators" making the kids and/or themselves?  And what powers of "interpretation" are coming into play?  Are these powers becoming increasingly deranged and deluded without suitable external check/criticism?

I will quote in full from Wesley Yang (more images and links at the link):

Live tweet of meeting of SF school board where they voted 6-0 to paint over a mural painted during 1930’s by Communist depicting George Washington in his capacity as slave owner and Indian fighter. The mural was intended to portray the moral ambiguity of the founding. 

The council voted to paint over the mural at a cost of $600,000 because it threatens their “safety.”
SF Board member cites White Fragility theory as justification for disregarding intent of painting by Communist in the 1930’s that portrayed Washington as Indian fighter and slave owner
"Robin DiAngelo and other critical race scholars consistently cite the fact that intent does not mitigate impact. Because we are a product of our times and our socialization, we may do and say things that are horribly racist and not understand why."
But there's a new therapeutic doctrine that has merged with anti-racist progressivism which holds that violent images have the power to induce trauma and must therefore live in a sanitized, expurgated reality.
This is an anti-rational and anti-artistic doctrine that recasts a form of primitive superstition as progress and enlightenment.
But schools of education have trafficked in this form of thinking and it has become the baseline for a generation of educators and administrators.
They are fully immunized against any justification made with reference to the older worldview, and feel that they are acting righteously in eradicating any and all traces of the past that deviate from the new orthodoxy. They cannot be persuaded of the errors of their ways.
This ideology has been around for decades and the cause of countless purges in left-wing spaces.
The SF board of education is what happens when Portlandia or the Park Slope Food Co-op control hundreds of million in funding and the schooling of the next generation.
The basic asymmetry we now confront is that the "worst are filled with passionate intensity." Overwhelming majorities of the public find this ridiculous but passively, while the most energetic actors believe this.
Alongside the worst filled with passionate intensity are those who run interference on behalf of a rise of an anti-rationalist, anti-artistic philistinism by portraying those criticize it as alarmist or hysterical
Just because the tendencies latent within the movement and openly avowed have not fully expressed themselves does not mean we should not say what they are. The guardrails just came off.
You will endlessly encounter people who will acknowledge that every instance of this is stupid without recognizing that it's not mere stupidity: it is action organized by a coherent worldview seeking for hegemony that will not be stopped unless something stops it.
Black students expressed concerns about the murals in 1968, but according to this article from the time, did not seek to destroy the murals but balance them with more positive representations of black people, such as those that made contributions to science
This concern was at least partially addressed in 1974 with the addition of art by a contemporary black painter
Arnautoff was a major artist and the school is an important repository of WPA era art.
...
An English teacher described student who “almost universally don’t think the answer is to erase it.”
The board made clear their justification for acting in a statement

So while it’s true that perennial concerns about representation and sensitivity clothe themselves in the jargon of different eras, the jargon proceeds from ideological tendencies that push toward certain outcomes. Even the radicalism of 1968 didn’t call for destruction of art.
For that, we had to wait until 2019 and the coming to fruition of an ideology that holds that people can’t look at art with critical distance, historical perspective, or aesthetic judgment, and they can’t and shouldn’t be taught to do so.
They should instead be protected from “harm” and their “safety” ensured through the destruction of art that troubles them.
The strongest argument on their side was “this isn’t a museum where people choose to go to be artistically challenged, but a school where kids cannot avoid seeing a vivid mural depicting a dead Indian and black slaves. If we could move it, we would, but we can’t.”
But we should attend closely to the ideas that are being enacted here. The people quoted in the Times piece indicated that most students didn’t want to destroy the painting. A supporter of removal said “the art is not worth saving if even one native student is triggered by that.”
What would in any other setting be seen as a reduction as absurdum is being avowed in earnest as the actual standard. And the truth is that the reality on the ground is likely to be close to that.
The news here is not that some people in a progressive echo chamber have absurd beliefs. That has always been true. The news is that those people have institutional power and are exercising it, and they are just getting started.
The idea that a painting by a major artist from the 1930’s has inherent value that has to be balanced against “even one person triggered” has zero standing. Everyone’s claim to be harmed or endangered is indefeasible and overrides all other values.
The authoritarian potential with which such a belief is charged is obvious; we no longer have to speculate about what those who hold these beliefs are prepared to do: at minimum they will happily force people never to state certain truths and compel them to avow falsehoods
They will also do things like forbid anyone from taking algebra in 8th grade as an ostensible measure against "white supremacy" even though 75 percent of those who take algebra in eighth grade are Asian, as the SF board of ed did a few years back.
With the result that fewer black and Hispanics were able to take calculus in senior years -- producing the exact opposite result to those intended
The SF Chancellor of Schools who led the push to ban 8th grade algebra then went to NYC, where he has mandated implicit bias training as part of the "decolonizing education" push that emerges from the same body of doctrine: [trainwrecky image of "White Supremacy Culture" training]
In April, the board abruptly canceled its school lunch contract over "taste and equity concerns" without a back up plan.
The board was forced reinstate the contract after students addressed the council citing concerns their peers would go hungry.
I don't live in SF or NYC but I've begun following local school board news in both places because they provide a working model of actually-existing progressivism in action -- Portlandia in power. It will only get worse until people organize to put a stop to it.
I mean this quote by an SF board member -- what satirical writer would have the chutzpah to invent such a quote?

[1] WHERE'S THE DATA ON TASTE??!!
[2] "What I'm hearing from a lot of folks is that we should renew the contract because we need to feed kids, and that's not the conversation we should be having."

Comprachicos and the Left

[A bit of context for newbies re my issues with leftism and leftist hubris.]

In 1970, Ayn Rand penned one of her most epic essays, "The Comprachicos" (context) the gist of which is to call out the "educational" establishment for mind-mangling practices.  The picture she paints is rather nightmarish and might lead the skeptical to ask whether she is in some delusional late-career stage.

("She was already out there in saying in 1960 that our age is intellectual bankrupt but whoa, she really went way out there after kicking Branden out, calling Kant the most evil man ever, etc.  Was anyone around to keep a check on her anymore?"  I have the Rand-bashers' number; I know the smears and sneers inside and out....)

But one should have a serious look at what an intellectual shitshow ("nightmare" may be going a tad far...) the Left is today and ask how that came about.

I've been reading through well-known libertarian economist Walter E. Williams' American Contempt for Liberty, a collection of his essays from ca. 2008-2014.  (Although he employs neither label, I refer to Williams as a libertarian rather than conservative because peppered throughout the book are explicit appeals to self-ownership and, consequently, to government coercing people into serving others is tantamount to slavery and/or theft.)  His commentaries on the sad state of our educational system - especially as it affects black people - are must-reads.  The nation's schools certify a huge percentage of students as being high-school-educated, who cannot perform beyond an 8th grade level.  (How does that not amount to a form of fraud?)  They do this all the while inflation-adjusted spending per pupil goes ever higher.  The teachers' unions have a stranglehold on the Democrat Party, with all the rent-capture this entails at the expense of the public's best interests.  They fight tooth and nail against reforms that threaten their monopoly position.

Content-wise, the "educators" have systematically abandoned the commitments to freedom and independence from government held by the Founders which are amply documented in Williams' essays.  It falls on deaf "progressive" ears when Ben Franklin is quoted as saying that "When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."  Like the intellectual and moral pigs they are, "progressives" cannot help but to demand ever more from the public trough at which to feed (with all their rationalizations about how it's mandated by "fairness," "equity," "compassion," etc.).  IOW, they've come to treat what the Founders considered perverse and destructive as normal and acceptable.

I'm not going to bother providing all the links documenting what a shitshow the academy is becoming these days, especially on politically-related matters (at both private and public universities - meaning it's not a matter merely of a rent-capturing K-12 monopoly but of something more widely explantory: ideology); you're either aware of the extremely-well-documented problem and want to see it fixed, or you're (culpably) unaware and therefore part of the problem.  If there's anything "progressives" lack these days, it's self-awareness.  (Why else do they adopt the label "progressive" if not to display the sense of their own intellectual and moral superiority, which they certainly haven't earned?)

My thesis is this:

Today's leftists are the most loyal products of 'Comprachico' tactics.  Unlike conservative or libertarian students they swallow all too uncritically the anti-America, anti-capitalism, anti-freedom stuff peddled by their mostly-leftist university faculty.  They're the ones calling most stridently for deplatforming of non-leftist views.  They're the ones who couldn't demonstrate a proper grasp of thinkers such as Rand if their life depended on it.  They can tell you all about Che Guevara and Michael Harrington and Cornel West and Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky but not be the least bit conversant with socialism's greatest critics (most notably Mises and Hayek, and of course Rand).  They are smug ignoramuses who "know" only their own side of the case.  AOC (Another Obnoxious Commie) is one famous example of such a Comprachico-ized mind.

They're the ones oblivious to the problem of the lack of intellectual diversity on campuses; after being told about that problem by Haidt and others, they've done nothing to improve (beyond a small percentage of colleges adopting the University of Chicago's statement of free-expression principles).  If anything, they've only been getting worse - doubling down on the systematic dishonesty.  One can see how leftists operate when they run amok, on such social-media sites as reddit (and twitter).  You'd probably have to be immersed awhile in the "default" politics-relevant subreddits (including the philosophy [sic] subreddit) to really get the flavor of the systematically-enforced leftist biases and nastiness toward contrary input (with all the bad-faith mental gymnastics to justify the bias and nastiness, to boot).  Many non-leftists have given up in disgust.

The American political scene today - the goings-on in D.C., state capitols, city halls - is an intellectual shitshow but it's the Dems and the "education" establishment they dominate who merit the lion's share of the blame.

The American Bible Belt (the Red States where, e.g., slavery and segregation were the norm until not so long ago) has a well-earned reputation for anti-intellectualism, bigotry, dogmatism, shunning expert opinion, etc.  The un-self-aware leftists and "educators" can identify the toxicity there for what it is; so why are they so blind to their own?

And if the Left and the "educators" are so intellectually and morally superior, why do we hear little to nothing from them about the (no-brainer) case for widespread philosophical education?

And, heck, where are the professional philosophers amidst all this intellectual bankruptcy?  If the populace could benefit greatly from a philosophical education, don't the philosophers face some kind of moral imperative to promote that solution given mainstream moral criteria, and not just write (narrow-audience) journal articles about moral imperatives and criteria?  ffs already  (I guess this means a wide-open opportunity for Yours Truly to capitalize upon and show up the competition [Rand notably excepted] so to speak, but it shouldn't have had to come to that.  I just want to philosophize, ffs, and the more rational a society of interlocutors to philosophize with, the better....)

[Update 6/25: After sharing this post in my internet circles this video with one John Taylor Gatto was brought to my attention; I surely intend to integrate this material in hopes that it will better enable me to give the hubristic leftist Comprachicos the epic drubbing (updated for the present day, that is) they richly deserve.]

Spreading philosophy for children ASAFP

As I keep pointing out (and for abundantly good reason), philosophy for children is far and away the biggest no-brainer of all time.  Right now people are fighting over crumbs compared to what's at stake here.  Given the nature of philosophical activity, properly conceived - as love of wisdom and therefore organized (and therefore better) living - there is perhaps no human problem that can't be solved by more philosophy.  (It gets even better with Aristotelian philosophy, which may be the best kind of philosophical activity around.  If you haven't yet thought in terms of 'Ultimate living through ultimate philosophy,' then you have some catching up to do.)

The thoroughly-researched Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry on Philosophy for Children has an almost fresh copyright date (2018), so it's not like this article has been sitting around for a long time not being noticed on its merits.  What the 2018 copyright date does say is that it took about that amount of time for a philosopher to do the necessary integration of research materials out there and consolidate the essential findings all in one place, with a compelling narrative tying it all together.

(I've had the time/resources only to go through McCarty's Little Big Minds, within the past several months or so.  Just on its own it makes a compelling case for philosophy for kids, but it has a 2006 copyright date.  What has happened in the intervening 13 years?  Someone with the time, interest and expertise had to come along and organize all the available research.  YouTube will provide leads to Jana Mohr Lone and others (edit: see also Lone's blog), but won't provide you the comprehensive set of leads available at the SEP entry.)

So we're into the second year after the SEP entry's publication, and at least one philosopher has taken up the task of blogging about it vigorously.  I have just taken the next step of contacting the author of the SEP entry by email to inquire about how best this no-brainer idea can be spread ASAFP.  The author probably has a good network of contacts in this area, and if a network of contacts includes philosophers, a potential intellectual juggernaut is in the making.  By its very nature any opposition to philosophy for children is intellectually impotent, easily overwhelmed given enough time and dedication among the philosophers, the most advanced-level integrators in the humanities.

The question: why didn't I think of contacting the author before today?  Well, this is the nature of incomplete and imperfect knowledge, and limitations on time and mental resources.  Were I smarter than I am (I am merely a fanatical lover/pursuer of wisdom), this may well have happened sooner.  The better (Aristotelian) policy of mental integration being applied, the sooner such discoveries can be made and exploited for maximum benefit.

And, so, if you're reading this, what measures might you take to help spread the message of philosophy for children?  Perhaps contact the author of the SEP entry as I have and express your support.  Provide the SEP link with a good money-quote (this linked one quoting the author that most anyone with philosophical curiosity themselves can teach this subject; and most anyone can have philosophical curiosity) on social media when good opportunities arise, making sure to mention how authoritative the SEP is.  Those are a couple ideas that occur to me so far.  (Do I have to do all this myself?  Or will the end of history simply have to be a collaborative effort?  But of course it will....)

When a philosopher-friend on facebook linked to this article (by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative almost despairing over the seductive appeal of "alt-right" views to alienated young white men seeking meaning (and we're not talking the benign and philosophical Jordan Peterson-type guidance, but, well, identity-politics for white males), the thought occurred to me: "Gee, wouldn't it be nice if this or the next generation of young males are taught to think philosophically before this all becomes a problem...."  Seeing as I can't fathom a remotely plausible comeback to this, there probably isn't one.

Is there any social problem that wouldn't be optimally addressed by philosophy for kids?  Just now I see on the news the latest story about cop-killing dirtbags.  Put the kids on philosophy and they won't end up being cop-killing dirtbags.

Given that this topic is of the highest priority for a wisdom-lover, I will continue to pursue this vigorously however I can.  Providing top-notch blog postings as evidence for the benefits philosophy can bring will continue to be a part of this process.  But others with sincere concern about the future of humanity will have to do their part, as well.

I am currently discussing a bet on facebook with Bryan Caplan (Econ, GMU), winner of 14 bets in a row and counting, as to how soon philosophy for children can/will be part of the regular education curriculum nationwide (if not worldwide...).  If you follow the logic of this through, at some point there will be a checkmate situation against any opposition to philosophy for children.  (Just the very publicizing of the bet/idea can only affect the very circumstances being betted on, in the direction of philosophy-for-children sooner than later.  Think this through, and the only end-result is checkmate, pretty soon.  Just what the endgame will look like, I do not know yet, but it should be pretty awesome.)  I am willing to bet with long odds.  Given my own context of knowledge, it's a no-brainer.

Like Sciabarra did his homework in his own area of expertise, I did my homework well enough to notice the McCarty book in a library (who uses those anymore?) and to notice and promote the SEP entry so relatively soon after its publication, as no other philosophy blog or social-media platform is doing (yet).  (I found the SEP entry by googling "philosophy for children" after finding only so much material on youtube and not being satisfied with that.)

The rest of this blog's entries, and my book, should be a good indicator of how well and thoroughly I do my homework.  Philosophy for children will get them doing their homework really darn well, also.

Why delay?

[Addendum: Why does American politics kinda suck right now?  Well, a huge part of it has to do with our elected 'leaders' being so philosophically illiterate when contrasted with all of the key Framers.  Think of whatever social problem we have and it probably, likely, or definitely has to do with not enough philosophy going around.]

[Addendum #2: Imagine a scenario: the teachers get a 5% bump in pay/funding if they teach philosophy for kids according to the best available researched protocols, and additional bumps as results come in. Why wouldn't they go for it?]

Philosophy for children, cont'd

When you can get philosophers in unanimity on something, you know (or do you?) that it's a no-brainer.  One thing that philosophers can be in unanimous agreement about, once they've read the (thoroughly researched) Stanford Encyclopedia entry at the very least, is the urgent necessity to spread the idea of philosophy for children as far and wide ASAFP.  Once again, a money quote:

Nevertheless, because they lack background in the formal study of philosophy, many teachers are reluctant to encourage the philosophical thinking of their students. Their fears, however, are exaggerated. Familiarity with some of the standard philosophical literature might be desirable, but it is not necessary for bringing Philosophy for Children into the classroom. What is required is the ability to facilitate philosophical discussion. For this, it is much more important that teachers have some philosophical curiosity themselves than a familiarity with academic philosophical literature. Like their students, teachers unfamiliar with the discipline of philosophy may nevertheless have an aptitude for philosophical thinking—or at least a knack for recognizing when others are engaged in philosophical thought. [emphasis added]

The implications of this are of end-of-history-level (or should I just say it: utopian) significance.  (I now have a bet on offer with Bryan Caplan on facebook about how soon, say, philosophy-for-children might end up in the regular education curriculum.  Given Caplan's betting protocols - he's undefeated in 14 bets and counting - I should be rather confident that I know whereof I speak.)  One implication is this: in order to do the rightest-possible thing by our kids and get them into philosophy at as young an age as feasible, the adults need to get philosophically curious themselves.  (About fucking time?)  Philosophy is intellectual curiosity, and intellectual curiosity about philosophy may well be the best kind there is.  Just maybe.

In light of this let's consider one piece of feedback I've gotten about this on facebook (on a homework-doing-focused group, Polymath Mafia):

Michael Strong Chris Cathcart I've been leading highly philosophical intellectual dialogues in classrooms since the 1980s. I started out in Chicago Public Schools, then created special dedicated programs in public schools in Alaska, and since then have created or co-created a charter and many private schools in which Socratic dialogue was core (I've looked at the Philosophy for Children curriculum and found it a bit too constraining for my tastes, but I've certainly spent thousands of hours engaging students of all ages in philosophical dialogue in classrooms). By the mid-1990s I had concluded that it is impossible to do this at scale with any kind of quality in government schools. The combination of political governance and bureaucratic management makes any kind of serious innovation at scale in public schools impossible. There are certainly individual teachers, principals, and occasionally superintendents who implement good programs for a period of time. But when the supporting school board member(s), superintendents, or principals leave then the programs tend to revert back towards the mean: Public education is mostly about compliance. In small districts there can be some responsiveness to parent demands, but in larger districts bureaucratic compliance is the name of the game. Moreover, in many parts of the US the parents are actively hostile to philosophical inquiry. When I was implementing Socratic questioning in Alaska, a parent approached me saying, "Your questions cause confusion. Confusion comes from Satan. What you are doing is Satanic. I'm going to get you kicked out of the district." And in most districts, 5-10 activist parents can kill just about any innovation. Thus paradoxically, in order to create a more philosophically sophisticated citizenry, we need to eliminate government schools and allow for a market in education. My book, which outlines my approach, https://www.amazon.com/Habit-Thought-Socratic-Seminars-Practice/dp/0944337392

(Is it any wonder Socrates was sentenced to death by hemlock for his philosophical activity - on charges of "corrupting the youth" and "denying the gods."  I believe the human race has since learned better.)

The kind of resistance described here can be remarkably easy to overcome.  For a period of years now I have been in regular personal discussion and correspondence with a Christian pastor who is thoroughly on board with the spread of wisdom-loving once I've explained the basic concept.  He is now urging me to write that (ultimate?) philosophy for children book that may well need to be written (or does it?...).  Take as an example the highest-level theistic philosophizing in blog format (or any other that I know of) at Maverick Philosopher.  Far as I can make out, Maverick is the wisest blogger on the planet and it might not be close.  (So anytime now, he, too, should be robustly on board with philosophy-for-children....)  If anything, the kids need philosophy to best defend their faith against the intellectual sloppiness and hubris of the 'new atheists.'  (David Bentley Hart's smackdown of the 'New Atheists' and their philosophical illiteracy is pretty epic.)  Aquinas is the greatest pro-intellectual-perfectionism figure in the Christian tradition.  There's nothing for Christian parents to fear here, and tons to gain.  (Doesn't a loving God want intellectual perfection for us, so that we may face our earthly demise with the utmost wisdom?)

I don't agree with all of Michael Strong's points above.  The schooling format is essentially irrelevant in this context.  The benefits far exceed any costs.  At the present time, fights over school formats or funding are fights over CRUMBS compared to what's at stake here.  The only problem here is an incompleteness of (shared) knowledge, is all.

Applied philosophy for children: An NFL do-over? (you know, for the kids)

This is part of a new series of blog posts on philosophy for children - far and away the biggest no-brainer in history - and I can't think of a better time for kid-accessible applied philosophy at the present time than the case of the worst no-call of all-time.  It has raised important ethical questions as to whether the Super Bowl is tainted.

In my earlier post I gave my reasons for regarding a Rams-[AFC Team] Super Bowl tainted due to the horrible officiating, and that the Rams in the name of honor and fair play should agree to a quick and easy do-over like the kids could figure out so easily in their street games.  They even admitted to cheating, so why not own up to that in action?  (Just resume it from where the game was assuming the play was called correctly, if the Saints score a touchdown they go the Super Bowl and if the Rams stop them they go.  The poor referee [I know, I've been there, but come on, man, ffs] even gets to save face.)

I mean, let's say the NFL asked the kids - their most important fan base, currently and long term (this sport is like pro wrestling but not all scripted; I liked both as a kid but outgrew only one of the two...), what they think the fair thing would be to do.  A do-over, right?

Should honor require the Rams to admit what getting away with a really significant cheat entails ethically, and to accept a do-over?  What do principles of justice and virtue (honor being among them) require here?  That would be a great exercise in getting the ball rolling in getting the kids to think philosophically.  Yes? :)

Oh, and wouldn't that be a lot better for the ratings (you know, for the adults)?  Not just the do-over, but the Super Bowl itself, which I and many others are planning as of now to avoid....

[In the posting queue: 'Ultimate Blogging tips: for Philosophers' ^_^ ]

Who can teach children philosophy?

Short answer: just about anyone!

From the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Philosophy for Children linked previously:

Nevertheless, because they lack background in the formal study of philosophy, many teachers are reluctant to encourage the philosophical thinking of their students. Their fears, however, are exaggerated. Familiarity with some of the standard philosophical literature might be desirable, but it is not necessary for bringing Philosophy for Children into the classroom. What is required is the ability to facilitate philosophical discussion. For this, it is much more important that teachers have some philosophical curiosity themselves than a familiarity with academic philosophical literature. Like their students, teachers unfamiliar with the discipline of philosophy may nevertheless have an aptitude for philosophical thinking—or at least a knack for recognizing when others are engaged in philosophical thought. [emphasis added]

And why should teacher and student alike possess a philosophical curiosity?  Because it facilitates better living.

Philosophy for children

If this is the last thing I ever write publicly that'll be okay, because it points to the best solution I can think of for society's present ills.

In recent days I've had to take time out of my otherwise top-priority heavy-duty philosophy text research.  (I only just now purchased, and need to read more than the first 50-ish pages of, Parfit's Reasons and Persons, ffs -- a task that one might think long overdue for a sage, which is not something I claim to be, as I am but a fanatical wisdom-seeker.)  Why have I had to put that research on hold?  Because of another topic of research of its own sort: the epistemic criminality run rampant -- also known by the term "toxicity" -- in our public discourse which I find everywhere I look on the internet and other mass media.  It has reached a fever pitch, having something to do with a MAGA-hat wearing President.  I've never seen it nearly this bad (save perhaps for observing Rand-bashers do their thing, which is about the lowest bar one can set).  The intellectual potential being wasted here is of monumental significance.  ("Monumental" seems an understatement, but "cataclysmic" may be overkill; somewhere in between?)  I plan to blog further about this in the coming days, but should I happen to kick the bucket before then, here is my proposed solution to all that:

Philosophy for Children (entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a resource the authoritativeness of which any philosopher can vouch for)

YouTube videos (59K views in 7 years for the most-viewed video here?  Seriously?)

If there's a way I could bet on philosophy-for-children futures, I would, because the stock is really cheap and the upside may be astronomical.  I don't even need to elaborate on the merits, it's all there in its gist in the article with all the leads you'd ever really need to get the ball rolling.  (One of the books in the bibliography I've read is Marietta McCarty's Little Big Minds: Sharing Philosophy with Kids.  It's good, even as a semi-casual refresher for long-time philosophers.  It makes it perfectly obvious that kids as young as about 7 years of age can integrate philosophical material.[*])  There's only good arguments in favor of philosophy for children, and no good arguments against that I can even fathom.

Perhaps the only thing needed to do to speed up the process of introducing this manifestly beneficial intellectual discipline to children is for a sufficiently ambitious author to integrate the available research on the subject with a fanatically intellectual-perfectionist approach to the very discipline of philosophy itself, and market the resulting product under the title of something like Better Living Through Philosophy: Kid's Edition.  The only thing necessary to make that happen is for someone to do the required research....

Cost-benefit-wise, this is far and away the biggest no-brainer of all time.

(Philosophy for adults isn't a bad idea, either....)

[*] - I might add "to their immeasurable enrichment" as a rhetorical flourish, even though measurement is fundamental to our conceptual form of reasoning.  But "immeasurable" may well be a technical and literal way of referring to enrichment in kind, not merely in degree.  Something to think about, anyway.  Ain't philosophy fun? :)  (Possible future blog topic: Is philosophy fun?)

[UPDATE: Who can teach children philosophy?  Short answer: just about anyone!]

Philosophical literacy

On the scale of importance, which is most important of the following: scientific literacy, economic literacy, or philosophical literacy?  Which is the one that is most likely to lead people to live better lives, and to improve the disappointing and sometimes downright lousy state of the public discourse?

Googling scientific literacy returns about 70 million results.  The search box dropdown options are filled to capacity.
Googling economic literacy returns about 135 million results.  Same story with the dropdown options.
Googling philosophical literacy returns about 12.5 million results.  The dropdown options . . . well, there's only one: "developing philosophical literacy".

(Google the "illiteracy" variant of these search words and you get 3.5 million, 9.9 million, and 700,000 results respectively.)

[Edit: At the suggestion of a facebook commenter, here are google search numbers for "historical literacy": 78 million results with an 8-item dropdown list.  "Historical illiteracy" returns 5.4 million results.]

There's enough scientific and economic illiteracy to go around as it is, and there's much attention paid to these problems.  Can you just imagine the scale of human problems that arise from philosophical illiteracy?

What if the incidence of scientific and economically illiteracy can both best be explained by philosophical illiteracy?

In America's founding generation, philosophical literacy seemed to have been a pretty big deal.  From the wikipedia article on the American Philosophical Society:

The Philosophical Society, as it was originally called, was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, James Alexander (lawyer), Francis Hopkinson, John Bartram, Philip Syng, Jr. and others^[2][3] as an offshoot of an earlier club, the Junto. It was founded two years after the University of Pennsylvania, with which it remains closely tied.

Since its inception, the society attracted America's finest minds. Early members included George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson,^[4] Alexander Hamilton, James McHenry, Thomas Paine, David Rittenhouse, Nicholas Biddle, Owen Biddle, Benjamin Rush, James Madison, Michael Hillegas, John Marshall, and John Andrews.

This listing includes all of what I term the "Big Seven" of the American Founding: Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Paine, Washington.

What are the chances that if these men were not of the sort who took philosophy as seriously as they did, that the American Founding would have happened as it did?

And what does our answer to that question imply about the quality of our political "leadership" today, or the political discourse in general?

[Addendum: I derive some of my inspiration for my abrasive language in my politics-related postings from Cole Robinson, the Snake Diet Wizard, who gets crazy weight-loss and health results.  As he pointed out recently, every time he says the word "fuck" in his videos, someone loses a pound.  (Every time he says "fat fucking pig," 10 pounds probably get lost.  I'm not shitting you.  Follow up with your own research if you don't believe me.  He is apparently showing just how nutritionally illiterate even the medical establishment is.  Do you know how much nutritional training med-school students get?  Would it sound to you, dear layperson, like it makes a travesty of the idea of medical school if such training is minimal there?)  The political realm as we know it is where a bunch of philosophically (as well as scientifically and economically) illiterate assholes get together and decide how much of their preferences to impose by force one everyone else.  Wouldn't America and the world benefit from one or more Philosophical Literacy Wizards to whip it into shape?  Who might be among the leading candidates for such an informal position, if you had to guess?  Who among them has even heard of Cole Robinson or the Snake Diet, as a sprawling research program might lead one to?  Who among them specifically and explicitly addresses the topic of philosophical literacy and its importance to human flourishing, and at least ponders how a comprehensive program for philosophical education might be implemented?  In this context there is one question just begging to be answered: why isn't even the philosophical community all gung-ho and loudly activist for the idea of philosophy for children?  It's right there in the SEP, ffs, a no-brainer, an idea with only good arguments for and none against.  I mean, philosophy instructors spend enough time as it is having to deal with philosophically illiterate college students, so wouldn't they prefer their students to come to the college already well-prepared for serious instruction akin to, oh, say, Plato's Academy?  What is the holdup?  What if professional hyper-specialization, not focused on the spread of philosophical literacy ASAFP, actually leads to less optimal research time and outcomes for those very specialists?  What's all that research and study good for, anyway, if 90% of the population suffers from lack of philosophy?  (I mean, I hardly know jack shit about, oh, say, set theory (yet...), but I have given a considerable deal of explicit/specific thought to the topic of better living through philosophy and what that entails for human cultural practice.  In this context, the ideas of Rand are a higher study/research priority than those of Russell, given my time and mental resources.)  Surely an ethical issue arises here....]

Links for the day (with relevance to the eventual Aristotelian/perfectivist cultural singularity)

(A note on terminology: The "cultural singularity" would basically be the vast majority of people adopting an "Aristotelian-Jeffersonian-Randian" way of life.)

1) On the 14th of this month, I promised something on the subject of "force, alienation, and the dialectical tradition."  (April 15th in America is a date widely noted for the federal government's use of physical compulsion or force against its citizens, see, and so the timing seemed appropriate.  Alas, I've been busy, hence the delay.)  In relation to that grouping of subjects, I floated this posting over at the philosophy subreddit (but, /r/philosophy being such a joke, it got next to no traction there, and it even received a downvote from an anonymous coward, probably an anti-Rand one if that forum's history is any guide).  Perfectivism, of course, urges the student of P/perfectivism to present the best theory he or she possibly can, with due engagement with the philosophical tradition.  This linked posting represents the state-of-the-art in such a process of dialectic.  Methinks that forums like /r/philosophy may very well just have to learn the hard way, whatever that turns out to be.

2) "What would Socrates do?"  A review by Naomi Schaefer Riley of the late Earl Shorris's The Art of Freedom, in today's Wall Street Journal.  I like how, in Shorris's Western-humanities curriculum which some idiots criticized as culturally imperialist, he opted for the likes of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty over African cultural studies.  Doesn't that rather conclusively demonstrate how some cultures are objectively superior to (i.e., more advanced than) others?  English culture gave rise to On Liberty; to what, comparably speaking, did African culture give rise?   (American culture, meanwhile, gave rise to The Fountainhead and Google.  America, fuck yeah!)  My, how easily the idiots can miss a point....

Note: Three days until I go on strike.  I'm thinking 4:20 p.m. on 4/20.  Whatever verbal rivers of gold that any of my saganized cognition generates thereafter may be my exclusive private domain indefinitely, unless or until the eminently reasonable conditions I've set forth are met.  I haven't ruled out forming some kind of "Ultimate Gulch" along with high standards for admission, however....

Time magazine: "Who Needs Philosophy?"

Full title: Who Needs Philosophy? Colleges Defend the Humanities Despite High Costs, Dim Job Prospects

This has the ominous flavor of a Catch-22 situation.  The nation's intellectual state leaves much to be desired as it is, which fuels the fire for those wondering what the use of academic majors such as Philosophy is, which only further fuels the fire of anti-intellectual sentiment and helps to stigmatize "the humanities" among college students who are understandably seeking degrees that are both intellectually-enriching and marketable in the employment world.  And we get quotes like this from the Time article:

“We should all be blessed enough to pursue life’s passion, but not everybody is,” says Tom Snyder, president of Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana, who says that the economy cannot support more art-history or philosophy majors.

facepalm

And 'round and 'round goes the vicious circle.  The article itself doesn't even helpfully distinguish between Philosophy majors and "humanities" majors.  What we have here is a failure to differentiate.

That makes this quite relevant.  Besides the STEM, economics, and banking majors, what other major stands out here as a promising source of much-needed verbal talent (on top of solid quantitative aptitude) in the employment world?

And, ohhhhh yes, for the very answer sought in the Time article's title, let's not forget this.  It's almost like . . . all cultural roads lead to a certain author; there she already is, ready and waiting, to serve as an answer to just this very sort of question.  And how is it that, like, she was the first and only big-name thinker to pose that very question?  Why the fuck didn't some name-philosopher think to pose and broadcast that particular question (and the answer to it) before then - or, it would seem, since then?  Whatever else she said and did, she knew how to market ideas in a way few have done so successfully.  Something something integrating intellectual aptitude with market aptitude.

Another ultimate hypothetical (which might very well be a variant upon some of those already posed): If everyone adopted and practiced the principles of living that she advocated - the actual principles she advocated, that is, not the sloppy caricatures or malicious smears of them - just how awesome would the world in fact be?  Use your imagination and just try - I triple dog dare you - to think of some plausible way that "things would go wrong."  Integrate your imaginative thought-experiment with the issues raised here.  Enjoy.