Rethink.

How fas­ci­nat­ing is that class
Whose only mem­ber is Me!
Sap­pho, Tiberius and I
Hold forth beside the sea.

What is cosier than the shore
Of a lake turned inside out?
How do all these other peo­ple
Dare to be about?

- from Auden’s “Islands”

1. So all the stu­dents came back from break on Wednes­day, and peo­ple are back to jump­ing off the walls again. I get to sit in on classes and go to choir and eat — that last thing didn’t hap­pen reg­u­larly dur­ing the week and a half this school was closed.

I’m not sick but con­cen­trat­ing comes in bits and spurts still. I feel like I’m push­ing myself and I always feel tire­dish and not much is get­ting done. (That should change in a few min­utes, though, espe­cially after I eat a lit­tle more.)

2. Yes­ter­day I caught a bit of Newt Gin­grich lec­tur­ing at some AEI thing on C-Span. Lots of things he said irri­tated me even when I agreed with him, but where we most sharply dis­agree is the pur­pose of education.

At one point he was propos­ing incen­tives to get peo­ple to fin­ish school more quickly and work. I don’t think that’s the worst thing — it’ll def­i­nitely work well for peo­ple who don’t want to be in school in the first place — but this “one size fits all” sort of view­point that empha­sizes prac­ti­cal over the­o­ret­i­cal learn­ing is just far too imma­ture to be con­sid­ered as the way to fix the schools. Could Speaker Gin­grich, who has a PhD., have attained the knowl­edge he has if the whole sys­tem were crafted to get him out of school as soon as possible?

More to the point: is edu­ca­tion about giv­ing you the knowl­edge you want and mak­ing you pro­duc­tive asap? Con­sider that many indi­vid­u­als of whom you may not approve were and are very pro­duc­tive. Mus­solini, after all, made the trains run on time. Porn stars prob­a­bly work very hard (I wouldn’t know — *whistles*).

As Joshua Parens has said, Mon­tesquieu does list “work” as a “virtue” in his account of “eco­nomic com­merce” — from the last, Amer­i­can modes and orders are derived. But Aris­to­tle and Plato would never con­sider work alone to be a virtue. That “work” would be con­sid­ered a virtue is an attack on real virtues, i.e. tem­per­ance or jus­tice or wisdom.

Gin­grich thinks hard work and busy-ness alone are an expres­sion of a higher value. The con­ser­v­a­tive blo­gos­phere echoes this non­sense when it declares that the major­ity of vis­i­tors on lib­eral sites don’t have jobs. The inabil­ity to think through this posi­tion entirely on the part of the Right should scare those of us who are con­ser­v­a­tive: it is prob­a­bly an indi­ca­tion that our los­ing the schools means that we’re get­ting dumber and not real­iz­ing it.

3. What I see hap­pen­ing is an increas­ing, unnat­ural diver­gence between my wants and the means needed to bring about those wants.

It’s one thing to expect me to make some com­pro­mises in my polit­i­cal vision when decid­ing on a can­di­date. But Speaker Gin­grich is not a can­di­date for office cur­rently, and com­pro­mise on the issue of edu­ca­tion with him in any case would be tan­ta­mount to say­ing I’ve wasted — and am wast­ing — my life.

The issue of school is yet another prob­lem. Yes, I’m happy with all I’m learn­ing here, and no one is treat­ing me badly. A few are treat­ing me very, very well. And yet, I’ll ask you my audi­ence this: don’t you think it’s rather curi­ous that I have vir­tu­ally no read­ers from my own uni­ver­sity, save one or two?

I’m not say­ing any of this to mope, although I feel mopey right now. The issue is big­ger — edu­ca­tion cen­tered around the indi­vid­ual and his desires has tri­umphed, and to lit­er­ally insist on more from edu­ca­tion of this sort makes those of us who see this as a social endeavor, cen­tered around a sense of value, exiles within the very walls we are most qual­i­fied to main­tain and fur­ther. I know I shouldn’t be the one feel­ing alien­ated from myself, not at this point, not with so much on the line and only an aim­less­ness dis­guised as “progress” defin­ing all pol­i­tics nowadays.

• For Repub­li­cans: On Cre­at­ing a Self-Sustaining, Edu­cated Party
• At the Uni­ver­sity of Dal­las, 3/28/10
• “Doing” Some­thing for the Repub­li­can Party Instead of Whin­ing has yielded this Extended Whine
• Rant: Is Sub­ur­bia Appro­pri­ate for Adults?
• Rant: The Banal­ity of Conservatism

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