Empty Head
There is a long held notion running from Aristotle and Stoic philosophers to John Locke that each human (Mind, actually) begins its development as a tabula rasa, or “smooth (no inscriptions) slate, erased tablet, or blank paper.” On this blank sheet each human writes his life from experiences (senses), including from enculturation both indirectly and indirectly (e.g., observing PDAs). This view means that every little thing that a baby, child, or young adult sees or hears creates the person that becomes an adult. Experience garnered through sense perception and culture educates us in all things worldly with the exceptions of…
That’s not to say we aren’t born without some a priori knowledge, some “instinct,” if you prefer, like ducking our heads turtle-like and raising our shoulders upon hearing some surprise sound or the call at a baseball field “heads up.” I assume our reflex actions go back into our own phylogeny, stuff left over, as Darwin noted, like the ear point (more visible on some ears than on those on which it turns inward), relicts of more “primitive” forms that passed onto us among other attributes, five-digit hands and feet and in some the ability to wiggle or raise ears as dogs move theirs. So, we aren’t completely empty heads at birth. We embody the biologists’ oft-quoted “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” That’s the imprint of our biological heritage.
Enculturation
Culture is a prolific writer on the tabula rasa. Have you ever been stopped at a train crossing to wait for a passing train? Unless the train has a newly serviced unit, every car in even the longest train bears graffiti. Stopped in your journey till the last train car passes, you sit to see what people have spray painted—some of it very good art, some bad—on the cars. That’s what enculturation is, a seemingly endless train of information about ideas, identities, and behaviors that you are forced to observe. And in today’s world, entertainment, punditry, social media and educational institutions make up much of the train that passes, carrying messages written feverishly in the manner of Jack Kerouac on benzedrine writing On the Road without punctuation like an American James Joyce writing Finnegan’s Wake. The only punctuation, the only pause for consideration is the coupling that both joins and separates the cars.
Higher Education
When do you think higher education will regain its reputation as a bastion of reason, learning, creativity, and merit and not as an avenue of forced equity and ideas that stop creative writing on the tabula rasa of each student? When will institutions of higher education simply carry—as a train transports products—information without endless political spin? Wasn’t the initial reason for higher education the transport of knowledge from old to young?
Well, maybe not purely so. I can imagine the 12th-century dark-robbed professors of the University of Bologna centering all lessons on Aristotle and Church dogma to the detriment of any free thinker. The consequence of thinking freely was ostracism, especially when it ran counter to some baloney at Balogna that an individual questioned (like DEI today). As more people became educated through the ensuing centuries and into the Renaissance, the consequences became more severe as the trials of Galileo and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) reveal, the former condemned to house arrest, the latter to burning at the stake. I suppose that today’s cancel culture in universities is mild by comparison.
Did I just read that some colleges have cancelled classes and provided counseling because Trump won the 2024 election? Where did the generation of students who walked to school barefoot or with duct tape for shoes through snow uphill and also back home uphill, those two-hill intrepid learners of old go?
Exaggeration aside, I’ll acknowledge that any differences between yesterday’s students and today’s might exist only in flawed memory. Certainly, I went to school with people who were happy when classes were cancelled, and I was frustrated by absenteeism as a professor. But just as certainly I never witnessed students running to cry when, for example, Richard Nixon won a second term even after Watergate or Ronald Reagan took the White House in the midst of an ongoing Iran-Contra affair. I should mention that I did hear of meltdowns in newspaper offices of the NY Times as young reporters, steeped in the ideas of their Leftist journalism schools, thought the world had ended when Bush II was elected after the Clinton years of happy reporters.
But today’s cry rooms and safe spaces on college campuses? You can, if you want, Google stories about such university actions. I did. And what I found alarmed me.
At Virginia Tech (VPI, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, now known as Virginia Tech), where the worst campus mass shooting occurred, the university’s counseling center offered students play with therapy dogs, arts and crafts, a "guided stretching" class, and "restorative dialogue" as part of the school's Election Day activities. Mind you, this is a school with at least ten different engineering programs and a military school with a three-battalion corps of uniformed cadets with a history that includes seven Medal of Honor recipients and many other highly decorated alumni. Therapy dogs? Those VPI grads who served in twentieth-century wars, if still alive, have to be disturbed by the coddling and concerned that their alma mater has become an expensive daycare center. Such is the state of a train that is supposed to transport the blank slates into volumes of learning.
Not just the Virginia Polytechnic Institute! At the University of Oregon, Fraternity and Sorority Life Assistant Director Leonard Serrato just made it clear what happened to the objective transfer of knowledge: In a further degradation of the university system already painted with meaningless and narcissistic graffiti, It fell into the abyss of hateful politics.
Serrato said in reference to those who voted for Trump, “You can literally go f*** yourself if you voted for Donald Trump. If you are so sad about your groceries being expensive, get a better f***** paying job. Do better for yourself. Get a f**** education. Because you’re f**** stupid. And I hope you go jump off of a f****** bridge.” This guy, now suspended by an embarrassed administration fearful it will lose donors, supposedly met all the qualifications of his position, two of which are “Effective verbal and written communication skills” and “A demonstrable commitment to promoting and enhancing diversity.” Diversity? Only if you think as liberals would have you think, only if you board a train headed Left.
Donors Beware
That some donors announced the end of their support for universities that fostered antisemitism serves as a model for other donors regarding universities fostering one-sided thinking and programs that are more concerned about erasing slates that bear the writing of dissident voices and truly diverse ideas. The train cars of today’s universities are rather empty of ideas unless those ideas are unified and on track to single-minded political results.
There is a long held notion running from Aristotle and Stoic philosophers to John Locke that each human (Mind, actually) begins its development as a tabula rasa, or “smooth (no inscriptions) slate, erased tablet, or blank paper.” On this blank sheet each human writes his life from experiences (senses), including from enculturation both indirectly and indirectly (e.g., observing PDAs). This view means that every little thing that a baby, child, or young adult sees or hears creates the person that becomes an adult. Experience garnered through sense perception and culture educates us in all things worldly with the exceptions of…
That’s not to say we aren’t born without some a priori knowledge, some “instinct,” if you prefer, like ducking our heads turtle-like and raising our shoulders upon hearing some surprise sound or the call at a baseball field “heads up.” I assume our reflex actions go back into our own phylogeny, stuff left over, as Darwin noted, like the ear point (more visible on some ears than on those on which it turns inward), relicts of more “primitive” forms that passed onto us among other attributes, five-digit hands and feet and in some the ability to wiggle or raise ears as dogs move theirs. So, we aren’t completely empty heads at birth. We embody the biologists’ oft-quoted “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” That’s the imprint of our biological heritage.
Enculturation
Culture is a prolific writer on the tabula rasa. Have you ever been stopped at a train crossing to wait for a passing train? Unless the train has a newly serviced unit, every car in even the longest train bears graffiti. Stopped in your journey till the last train car passes, you sit to see what people have spray painted—some of it very good art, some bad—on the cars. That’s what enculturation is, a seemingly endless train of information about ideas, identities, and behaviors that you are forced to observe. And in today’s world, entertainment, punditry, social media and educational institutions make up much of the train that passes, carrying messages written feverishly in the manner of Jack Kerouac on benzedrine writing On the Road without punctuation like an American James Joyce writing Finnegan’s Wake. The only punctuation, the only pause for consideration is the coupling that both joins and separates the cars.
Higher Education
When do you think higher education will regain its reputation as a bastion of reason, learning, creativity, and merit and not as an avenue of forced equity and ideas that stop creative writing on the tabula rasa of each student? When will institutions of higher education simply carry—as a train transports products—information without endless political spin? Wasn’t the initial reason for higher education the transport of knowledge from old to young?
Well, maybe not purely so. I can imagine the 12th-century dark-robbed professors of the University of Bologna centering all lessons on Aristotle and Church dogma to the detriment of any free thinker. The consequence of thinking freely was ostracism, especially when it ran counter to some baloney at Balogna that an individual questioned (like DEI today). As more people became educated through the ensuing centuries and into the Renaissance, the consequences became more severe as the trials of Galileo and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) reveal, the former condemned to house arrest, the latter to burning at the stake. I suppose that today’s cancel culture in universities is mild by comparison.
Did I just read that some colleges have cancelled classes and provided counseling because Trump won the 2024 election? Where did the generation of students who walked to school barefoot or with duct tape for shoes through snow uphill and also back home uphill, those two-hill intrepid learners of old go?
Exaggeration aside, I’ll acknowledge that any differences between yesterday’s students and today’s might exist only in flawed memory. Certainly, I went to school with people who were happy when classes were cancelled, and I was frustrated by absenteeism as a professor. But just as certainly I never witnessed students running to cry when, for example, Richard Nixon won a second term even after Watergate or Ronald Reagan took the White House in the midst of an ongoing Iran-Contra affair. I should mention that I did hear of meltdowns in newspaper offices of the NY Times as young reporters, steeped in the ideas of their Leftist journalism schools, thought the world had ended when Bush II was elected after the Clinton years of happy reporters.
But today’s cry rooms and safe spaces on college campuses? You can, if you want, Google stories about such university actions. I did. And what I found alarmed me.
At Virginia Tech (VPI, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, now known as Virginia Tech), where the worst campus mass shooting occurred, the university’s counseling center offered students play with therapy dogs, arts and crafts, a "guided stretching" class, and "restorative dialogue" as part of the school's Election Day activities. Mind you, this is a school with at least ten different engineering programs and a military school with a three-battalion corps of uniformed cadets with a history that includes seven Medal of Honor recipients and many other highly decorated alumni. Therapy dogs? Those VPI grads who served in twentieth-century wars, if still alive, have to be disturbed by the coddling and concerned that their alma mater has become an expensive daycare center. Such is the state of a train that is supposed to transport the blank slates into volumes of learning.
Not just the Virginia Polytechnic Institute! At the University of Oregon, Fraternity and Sorority Life Assistant Director Leonard Serrato just made it clear what happened to the objective transfer of knowledge: In a further degradation of the university system already painted with meaningless and narcissistic graffiti, It fell into the abyss of hateful politics.
Serrato said in reference to those who voted for Trump, “You can literally go f*** yourself if you voted for Donald Trump. If you are so sad about your groceries being expensive, get a better f***** paying job. Do better for yourself. Get a f**** education. Because you’re f**** stupid. And I hope you go jump off of a f****** bridge.” This guy, now suspended by an embarrassed administration fearful it will lose donors, supposedly met all the qualifications of his position, two of which are “Effective verbal and written communication skills” and “A demonstrable commitment to promoting and enhancing diversity.” Diversity? Only if you think as liberals would have you think, only if you board a train headed Left.
Donors Beware
That some donors announced the end of their support for universities that fostered antisemitism serves as a model for other donors regarding universities fostering one-sided thinking and programs that are more concerned about erasing slates that bear the writing of dissident voices and truly diverse ideas. The train cars of today’s universities are rather empty of ideas unless those ideas are unified and on track to single-minded political results.
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