Generally speaking, history taught them two lessons. Ancient history taught that nations rose and fell. When they fell, it was not from external conquest but from internal corruption. The process of corruption and decay was clearly understood: it took place when a people lost its virtue—virtue, in the original Latin sense, meaning manliness and being closely related to virility. The opposite of virtue was effeminacy, a term that was used interchangeably with vice, corruption, softness, and love of luxury. Once a nation started down the road to a love of luxury, it was doomed; only sumptuary legislation might save it, but sumptuary legislation usually came too late. A related danger was the resort to standing armies—partly because a standing army was inherently inimical to liberty, partly because it required a large and continuous public expenditure, which increased debts and taxes and thereby contributed to luxury—but mainly because it entailed a most unmanly shifting of responsibility for one’s own defense to the hands of others.

in the Convention, while references to philosophers were relatively infrequent, the delegates made nearly 400 references to history to justify their positions.

“Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.”

Sassoon’s lament for the dehumanizing and destructive effects of technolatry represents “a true prophetic cry”:

Slaves to the alchemy which calls itself technological progress, we seek the elixir of life which will defeat death and the philosopher’s stone of limitless wealth. We seek to live unendingly, chained to the wheel of progress uncontrolled, and we seek to turn base metal, and plastic, and silicon, into gold, turning ourselves into creatures of base metal in the process, unregenerate still in head and heart.

Chained to the wheel of progress uncontrolled, and possessed by our possessions, we had succumbed to a globalism beyond reach of any constraining power.

Man was no longer seen as good or evil because he was merely matter, like everything else in the cosmos. And if man was merely matter, he didn’t really matter.

Chained to the wheel of progress uncontrolled;

In slavedom of mankind to the machine;

ardinal virtues—courage, justice, prudence, and temperance—will always speak to the human soul and be a

What would the archbishop tell those who, in the wake of modernity, cannot accept the idea that the meaning of life is something we receive, rather than being able to generate it autonomously?

Lloyd Blankfein, until recently the CEO of Goldman Sachs, counseled, “Study the humanities. Know how people think, know how the cycles work, know the lessons of history.” Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, insists that the most important skills gap in America is not coding; the gap is in “soft skills” like writing, persuasion, and leadership.

Once everyone is using it, deviating from the default settings becomes a rebellious act. Company-trained proctors will be the secret weapons of gubernatorial austerity; look for these regrettable, hard choices to be made for poorer districts during the next recession.

An Oxford University study on the vulnerability of different jobs to automation, the largest on the topic, concluded that students who want to prosper in the future must travel against the prevailing ideological winds—that is, they will have to “acquire creative and social skills.”25

Replacing handwriting with typing is academic malpractice, given the overwhelming evidence on the value of handwriting for brain development, deeper learning, and memory.18 Reading on paper results in better understanding than reading on screens.19 Today’s “distraction machines” weaken our ability to concentrate and even make us worse at multitasking.20 STEM initiatives only exacerbate the broader social ills of addiction to technology and tech-related mental health problems.21 American and English public health officials warn about the strong links between screen use and childhood anxiety, depression, obesity, and low self-esteem.2

The most obvious change, substituting for teachers, has proven counterproductive: “using educational technology to replace teachers or to scale ineffective practices guarantees poorer learning outcomes.”16

Distraction, in this case, had the greatest effects on long-term retention. One surprising result was that of memory impairment even for students who didn’t use devices, if they were placed in classes where many other students did—a kind of technological contact high (or low, in this case). The study authors explain the latter effect in terms of device-riddled classes having been changed “from an occasion for joint attention to more like a group of individuals in a waiting room occasionally looking up.”

The largest international education survey, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), most recently tested over 540,000 students in seventy-two countries with exams on reading, science, and mathematics. The latest results showed that classroom usage of all of the most advanced equipment was associated with worse student performance

he sciences and mathematics have a historic place in the curriculum, and technology does not, for the simple reason that the latter is not inherently “about” anything. Absent human contributions on specific topics, cut off from the subject matter of academic work, technology is nothing

he theory of relativity, calculus, even the physics of a bridge—these are deemed valuable not for helping us reach the good, the true, and the beautiful, but only insofar as they give us GPS satellites, efficient insurance pricing, and interstate highways—and even then, only if the latter public goods are mediated by private profits.

he purpose of education in the sciences is to cultivate children as knowers in and of the world. The purpose of STEM programs is just to create more of a certain kind of worker.

the push was never really about science on its own terms or for its own sake. These efforts are all about technology, especially technology as a substitute for a well-ordered political economy.

Liberal arts education, which has always given a central position to mathematics and the sciences,2 will only be harmed by the recent push to “get more STEM in schools,”3 because today’s STEM has only a cosmetic relationship with the sciences.

in many public school districts we have already traded our collective birthright, the promise of human flourishing, for a mess of utilitarian pottage called “job skills.”

Education is the cultivation of a person, not the manufacture of a worker.

the technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development and an unredeemable waste. In the first place, technology exacerbates the greatest problem of all in schools: confusion about their purpose.

God is dead because we have made existence revolve around our banality and so collapsed the theocentric into the anthropocentric.

Each atheism entails extreme love that makes the self the measure of the good

to be virtuous requires that the person “be loyal to his superior instead.”

common ground.

When done right, brand partnerships can have the power to elevate both brands. But, you can't force a connection. There's gotta be a spark. You want to have common ground with the other brand, but not so much common ground that you're competing with each other.

This discussion was part of an introduction to an essay assignment about whether Americans should pay more for ethically produced food.