I’ll just re-post in opposition to the Oberlin model, where, apparently, practice of the ‘liberal arts’ can become so liberal brains might fall out; curation of the arts beholden to students driven by ideology and bureaucrats enabling them in a rather destructive feedback loop. The recent settlement will not likely help many budding artists, I suspect. Godspeed, budding artists.
It probably hasn’t helped relations with the surrounding townsfolk, either.
Discovering the truth should always be part of your life.
The only other Oberlin reference I can find on this blog is Lena Dunham (Kevin Williamson is not a fan). Personally, I say ‘no thanks ‘to much anaesthetic (don’t look at me, oppressor), liberatory (look at my body) popular art, especially when it becomes explicity political and/or ideological.
If you need your art to grant you identity enough to be somebody, even if you are a successful popular artist, you should probably work on your art more.
If you need group identity enough to matter in the world (woman, black, white, gay), especially in politics, you should probably work on your life, work and relationships more.
Politics is what it is, and utopia it ain’t.
—
More here.
Link sent in by a reader.
Interesting paper presented by Erika Kiss, beginning about minute 32:00 (the whole conference is likely worth your time for more knowledge on Oakeshott).
According to Kiss, Oakeshott’s non-teleological, non-purposive view of education is potentially a response to Friedrich Hayek, Martha Nussbaum, and Allan Bloom, in the sense that all of these thinkers posit some useful purpose or outcome in getting a liberal education.
Hayek’s profound epistemological attack on rationalist thought is still a system itself, and attaches learning to market-based processes which eventually drive freedom and new thinking in universities. The two are mutually dependent to some extent.
Nussbaum attaches liberal learning to ends such as making us ‘Aristotelian citizens of the world’, or better citizens in a democracy, which has struck me as incomplete at best.
Allan Bloom is profoundly influenced by Straussian ne0-classicism, and wants love, classical learning, honor and duty to perhaps be those reasons why a young man or woman should read the classics. This, instead of crass commercialism, the influences of popular music, deconstructionism and logical positivism.
On this site, see: Mark Pennington Via Vimeo: ‘Democracy And The Deliberative Conceit’
A taste of her Nussbaum here. Also, see: From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’
Via C-SPAN-The Historical Context Of Allan Bloom
…Timothy Fuller At The New Criterion: ‘The Compensations Of Michael Oakeshott’John Gray At The Literary Review Takes A Look At A New Book On Michael Oakeshott: ‘Last Of The Idealists’
Is there anybody whom you trust to decide what you should and shouldn’t read?
Parents? Great authors? Public intellectuals? Professors? God? Laws and lawmakers? Religious leaders? A school-board? A democratic majority? People who think like you? A Council of Cultural Marxists?
The Department of Institutionalized Idiocy?
uploaded by mattbucher