Comments on: An Open Letter To Sarah Palin

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:45:23 +0000

Sarah Palin could not push a smooth rock down a steep hill. And she will never, ever, ever hold national office. Ever.

By: amanda

amanda — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:37:07 +0000

Definitely a nice post on Sarah- We really didn’t know much about her and the media is absolute immature sensationalist garbage. While I may not have supported her in the last election you really have to respect such an up front woman… and she seems relatively trustworthy.

By: thag

thag — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:39:22 +0000

Also, I find what you said about “a better case for submission to Biblical authority” interesting. Do you mean something like the teaching of the book of Job — in so many words, “you’re human, don’t argue against God”? I would be impressed to hear a teacher/professor go to lengths to explain why someone shouldn’t argue; maybe that happens in some private education, but I would have no idea.

I don’t want to neglect the rest of what you’ve written about Palin, but I found that part particularly interesting, and it is something that raises contention with her. I remember watching some vid on YouTube of Matt Damon (!) presumptuously (I don’t know if she thinks this or not) saying, “I really want to know if she thinks dinosaurs were around 4,000 years ago.”

By: thag

thag — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:39:02 +0000

Maybe I just can’t understand why some learned and named professors wouldn’t want people to think, but it would seem to me that there is a depressing lack of faith. I know a Lincoln scholar who went to a public high school to speak some years back, telling the teachers to circulate the Gettysburg Address a week beforehand. When he met with the students and asked what they liked best that they had read about Lincoln, one student broke a long silence and shyly responded that their teacher had told them it would do them any good — they couldn’t understand it.

That isn’t even an issue of partisanship — that is a crisis of belief in self-government completely! Regardless of one’s political stripe, that is a travesty.

Those truly committed to this idea of educating people are doing great work though, and close to my town you could even hear a professor speak on any number of topics — open to the public. Maybe this is an exception to the rule, but the thing is…people show up! And there are better things to talk about than the John Birch Society apparently has on its plate, as you point out.

By: ashok

ashok — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:31:08 +0000

@ thag – Yeah, you see where I’m going. Independent of the “let’s teach Republicans about Lincoln and Democrats about Rousseau and Mill” thing, I think the most professional thing in the university is for a privately conservative professor to be able to articulate and defend liberal arguments, and vice versa for a liberal professor. But since either professor is going to be charged anyway with being biased – as if partisanship were inherently evil – I’m willing to say “hey, I’ll just get yelled by you idiots for being biased, because what I have to teach will outlast your petty name-calling.”

Of course, all of this depends on close-reading, which is less about reading and really more about learning to articulate good questions and examine them with rigor. And hahahaha wouldn’t you know it but some of the dumbest and most powerful voices in the academy – on both the Left and Right – think that people thinking for themselves is something that shouldn’t be allowed.

We’ll win back education for the thoughtful. But it can’t really start in the classroom. It has to start here, in willingness to be open to something new in our everyday lives.

By: thag

thag — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:54:39 +0000

I see where Chris is going, and I agree that it is especially hard for conservatives everywhere with regard to education. I recently came across this article that snubs what is going on at UVa because an American Political Thought program was funded by an ‘ideological’ group. That article can be found here:

http://chronicle.com/cgi2-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i41/41millercenter.htm

But as you can see, the “ideology” pushed on students was simply a close reading of the Federalist Papers, and other Founding documents. Only a hit-piece would ever suggest that studying such work is ipso facto a conservative undertaking. I mean, I get it. But after all, they aren’t asking them to teach Creationism. That BTW was one thing I never could fully grapple with, either, and I think you did a fine job of explaining how one handles personal faith and its place in the classroom. If only we could get more to agree. Put out the good questions worth asking rather than tell them what to think and people’s minds will be naturally inclined to the thing more than we even realize…

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:04:39 +0000

Good post. Lots of good information about Palin that I was not aware of. I suspect she will be the person causing things to happen in the US over the next few years.

However, I need to disagree with the notion that conservatives are and have been hostile to education. If anything we are disappointed, and one things that disappoints us about education is the notion that it is being used. Now if I am reading you right that is exactly what you suggest conservative do. You suggest that we as conservatives also start using education in one of ways that liberals do. Do one of the very things that disappoints us? Manipulate education so that it drives people to our cause? I don’t think so. Now, if a case could be made for conservatives to manipulate education, it would be made not to drive people to our cause but to stop others from driving people to their causes. We would of course be less disappointed in education, but, we would be asking conservatives to be progressive and that is not what conservatives do.