I don’t believe education fits under Milton Friedman’s intellectual net, but I like seeing how he comes at the problems of scarcity of resources, students failed by the system, and entrenched educators:
New technology comes raining down into your life all the time, so how are you managing it in order to get news and information? Which other people are you looking to manage it for you?
How does this change with whom you might associate, which job you take, what’s true and important, and finally, how define your life in a Constitutional Republic with a representative democracy? (Ok, had to get that last part in there)
Great read.
Interesting times.
Jerry Pournelle saw some of this coming back in 1979! Here he is predicting with surprising accuracy how the WWW and computing technology might revolutionize publishing.
Butterfly collars. Cigarettes on air. Those were the days:
‘They’re self-selecting, Richard. The BBC does its recruiting through the pages of the (left-wing) Guardian, so its staff have the same bien-pensant world view. They would consider themselves centrist, moderate, reasonable, not politically biased. But that’s because everyone in the circles in which they move thinks the same way. Very few of them, I think, set out deliberately to distort the truth. It comes to them quite naturally and unconsciously.’
‘It’s not that the network’s editorial brain trust meets each morning to plot the day’s campaign to rid America of Republican taint. It’s that the newsroom is composed almost entirely of like-minded people who share one another’s major philosophical precepts. When my sister says that she wants to hear news from people who think like me, she’s put her finger on the problem’
Extra special bonus***-Anti-multiculturalist provacateur of the Anglosphere!, Mark Steyn discusses complaints brought against Macleans, Canada’s largest publication, by the President of the Canadian Islamic Congress (who sent three representatives) to TVOntario. They were upset at the pieces Steyn had published there. The complaints went through the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal for alleged “Islamophobia” and “promoting hate:”
The connection here is what happens in Canadian society in the wake of the ideas the CBC promotes, and beneath the umbrella of more Left liberal ideas:
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The CBC actually defends Steyn a bit, which is slightly remarkable as Canada does not have nearly the same broad definitions of free speech we have here in the U.S.
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Clearly, “hate” can get you viewers and make some fun.
My two cents:
Nationalization protects the BBC and the CBC from market competition and thus they remain less open to criticism, innovation, and the interests of large swathes of their taxpayers. Those who have self-selected and made a niche for themselves in such institutions, can more easily discriminate on that basis, even unconsciously. They don’t tend to be friendly to business interests and people in business because they don’t as directly depend on business for advertising dollars. This insulation allows some to think of themselves as gatekeepers to higher culture and above such incentives in the first place.
Generally, all of them seem to put environmentalism and multiculturalism first, above other ideas. A kind of world-mash humanism is the norm and it’s never hard to find a story that trades in the same stuff as the “studies” disciplines that have sprung up in our universities where an “expert” can always be found to comment on the story of the day.
In addition, there is coverage of the Sciences and world events which does the public good, but there seems to be a penchant for science coverage that supports the more liberal worldview along with a penchant for psychology, literary analysis and music criticism that usually favors their own interests: feminism, equality between the sexes and among the races (multiculturalism and humanism again).
Higher culture, modern liberal assumptions and current events are usually combined into bite-sized, well-produced, reasonably thoughtful morsels. A high-end product is produced, but at what cost?
‘But what’s so public about public art? Is it “public” simply because it’s stuck in public places? And who asks for it? In a recent interview with Manner of Man Magazine, Alexander Stoddart, Sculptor in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen in Scotland, hits the nail on the head.’
Click through for some good quotes. Why is public art often so bad? What happens when art gets attached with money, and yes, also money through grants?