The Skill No Algorithm Can Copy: What Israel Kirzner Knew About Entrepreneurial Alertness
What makes an entrepreneur? Ask most people and you’ll hear about capital, connections, or a high tolerance for risk. Ask the economist Israel Kirzner and you’ll get a very different answer: alertness. Kirzner, who taught at New York University for decades and studied under Ludwig von Mises, spent his career answering a question that mainstream […]
AI, Critical Thinking, and Socratic Practice in Higher Education
AI is spreading across academia, and as studies warn of its harm to critical thinking, Reliance College’s Socratic Practice offers a way to restore it.
Is Education In the Far East What It’s Cracked Up To Be?
I’ve spent most of my adult life examining the deficits of US education and tenure is one of the strong nails securing its coffin, as reported in The Heartland Institute blog: “In many districts, simply recommending a tenured teacher for dismissal takes at least two years because the district must document both the teacher’s weak […]
Sanitizing a Classic
Sunny Arbarbanelli alerted me to the latest perversion of current culture: a version of Mark Twain’s famous anti-racism classic, Huckleberry Finn, in which offensive words have been replaced to make the work more “palatable” to current students. The BBC report says: “‘The book is an anti-racist book and to change the language changes the power […]
The Classroom Is No Joke Anymore
At this link you can read about how a beloved teacher of 34 years at the Quaker School in Manhattan was sacked over a truly silly, situational Hitler joke. Unfortunately, only too many “well-educated” people not only go along with this kind of destructive nonsense out of fear, but become the enforcers to prove their […]
Intellectual Humility and an Open Mind
Open Minds? When I celebrate Thanksgiving, I always think of the intrepid travelers (pictured above) who came to the northeast of the New World in the month of November, for gosh sakes, of 1620. They were pious dissenting Protestants, and they came for intellectual freedom. But what they weren’t was intellectually humble. What I mean […]
Tuition Skyrockets As You Make More Money
Alex Tabarrok at the Marginal Revolution blog analyses the huge price disparities in tuition for people of different income brackets here. This reduces income inequality and opportunity, but it punishes the incentive to work and those having more children. “At many private colleges and universities it is not unusual for some students to be paying $70,000 […]
What is “Enlightenment” Thought?
With recent books and articles being published on the Enlightenment, Iona Italia does a great job of providing us with a short primer on Enlightenment thought. “We are in many ways the inheritors of the Enlightenment. But its opponents are legion. We have the proponents of identity politics, for whom the truth of what you say is less […]
Middlebury Students Use the Brownshirts’ Playbook
Make no mistake about it: the New Left has unleashed their minions on free speech via Nazi Brownshirt tactics and Middlebury College is a recent arena for them. The New Left failed to take control of U.S. culture directly via the government, so instead they taught thousands of college students at the “best” colleges that force is […]
Great Connections at ISFLC 2016
We’re excited to announce that we’ll be exhibiting information about The Great Connections at the 2016 International Students for Liberty Conference (ISFLC) in Washington, D.C. Dates: February 26-27Location: Marriott Wardman Park hotel. Exhibiting at ISFLC16 We’ve been exhibiting at ISFLC for years because we know it’s one of the biggest gathering of students who are passionate […]