Back in the Sixties, it was easy enough for conservatives to take pot shots at radical students. Not only were they out to subvert the state, but their lifestyle seemed calculated to transgress all standards of decency. They were long-haired …
The Service of Dissent
Is academic freedom becoming a casualty of the modern university, as the latter is transformed by the public-private partnerships that increasingly dominate our political life?
Just before Easter, a Montreal man, father of four and full professor at a university …
The truth about Britain’s teenage terrorists
To read a British newspaper or to listen to the rhetoric of counter-terrorism police, you could be forgiven for thinking that the country has incubated a new generation of child extremists. And not just any child extremists: unlike previous moral …
Letters to a Young Medical Student
The following text represents an interaction I had with a young medical student in the first year of medical school. I also include two brief excerpts showing how anti-intellectualism and closed mindedness are sabotaging key institutions, in this case the …
Nightmares of the Elite
Almost every night, I have the exact same dream, which might be described as a mild nightmare. In my dreams, I realize the world needs to be warned about the 100-percent capture rate of society’s “truth-seeking” organizations. The dreams always …
The plot against Britain’s children
Last year, the Financial Times reported from the village of Ichinono in Japan. In common with a lot of Japanese villages, Ichinono’s population is small, old and vanishing: just 53 people, most of them over retirement age. In Japan as …
The Fall of Critical Thinking
The Covid panic and repression did not happen in a vacuum. A pattern of persecuting people rather than engaging those with dissenting opinions had already been well-established in the educational world and the mainstream mass media, making the oppressive treatment …
Devon’s children are being left behind
When people imagine rural poverty, the sandy beaches, thatched cottages, and cream teas of Devon, Cornwall and Somerset rarely spring to mind. But out of sight of holidaymakers and second-homers, life is not so rosy. In washed-out South Western towns …
The Harm of College Vaccine Mandates
Who would have believed we’d still be talking about Covid vaccine mandates in 2024, but given how resistant authority figures are to accepting reality, or defeat or acknowledging mistakes, it seems likely we’ll unfortunately be subjected to talking about them forever.
Dozens …
Health Care Students Still Suffer Force
A tremendous injustice is taking place in health care education, and most people are entirely unaware of it.
Today, almost four years since the Covid pandemic began, nearly all US medical students, nursing students, and students training in other healthcare …
Why are Americans becoming more stupid?
“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind,” said Winston Churchill. And judging by the state of education in America, it seems both of those empires could soon crumble. The dysfunction is evident from top to bottom: …
ChatGPT Can Get Off My Lawn
Will artificial intelligence become the greatest boon to higher education since online learning? (This assumes that online learning was a boon, which is a topic for another day.) Or will it mean the utter destruction of academia as we know …
The tragedy of Britain’s school-refusers
Harry Hocking was just 14 when he texted his mother to tell her he was in desperate trouble and needed help. On the way to school, he had become frozen with anxiety and unable to breathe or walk. Such was …
Schumpeter on How Higher Education Wrecks Freedom
A book that pays high returns for decades with endless insights is Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1943). It is not a systematic treatise. It’s more of a series of observations about huge problems that vexed those times and …
We are all prisoners in Plato’s Cave
Some meditations on the human condition blaze with truth even after millennia. And perhaps none more so than Plato’s Cave. Plato assumes what was self-evident to both the simple and the wise from the beginning of civilisation until just yesterday: …