sometimes i wonder how many versions of myself i’ve outgrown without even noticing. i look back at old photos and remember the thoughts i used to carry, the dreams i thought would save me. it’s strange how you can live inside yourself every day and still not realize you’re evolving. it’s only when you look back that you realize how far you’ve come, how many lives you’ve already lived in the same skin.
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The next president has to do two things: 1) right the wrongs of Trump and go after those who broke the law and were corrupt. 2). Then spend time divesting power from the presidency and building real guardrails and passing laws like, “the president is not immune” etc.
Oh and get the money out of politics
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An interesting piece. One of the more interesting things to come out of last year's UK Commission on Race and Equality was the comparison between the UK's racial attainment gap in education and the US's. The US's is 8 times wider than the UK's (-0.89 v -0.1). https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities/education-and-training In the UK, the report confirmed that the groups with the lowest attainment are both white --Irish Travellers and…
Thank you, Michelle. Yes, yes: basic literacy should be a primary focus. I also think that helping young people learn emotional management and regulation is key. Some call this "soft skills"; I prefer Seth Godin's term: real skills to enhance civil dialogue and interpersonal relationships.
I also appreciate you making comparisons beyond simplistic racial categorization, focusing instead on where the U.S. overall is falling down in basic education. That's why on my recent appearance on The Glenn…
Yes, good. It is long past the time the US public started to get its head around the failure in basic domestic education for all its citizens problem, instead of being distracted by St Ives type considerations which are the simplistic racial categories (I assume you know the old nursery rhyme which goes when I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives, and every wife had seven sacks, and every sack had seven cats and every cat seven kits -- kits, cats, sacks and wives, how many were going to St Ives? The answer is of course 1 -- the speaker). If you have 100 students, and 25 do not have basic skills. It doesn't matter how you parse their make up or ancestry, at the end you still have 25 who remain in need of a basic education. It goes down to whether or not you want a gold , silver and sewage for the rest education system or one which enables all citizens to become active contributors to society's overall quality of life. Immigration and the immigrant's drive to succeed to a certain extent has allowed the US to be distracted from the decades long domestic failure in providing adequate public education to its native citizens, but ultimately how long US society can rely on draining brains from other countries is an open question. It is also about improving occupational mobility -- providing the skills which will enable citizens to move to jobs which provide a better lifestyle -- this is a slightly different emphasis than social mobility. I think this is what you are getting it as well. Occupational mobility allows for people to improve their quality of life. One only has to look at ancient Rome and the slide into the so-called Dark Ages to see what happened when the skill sets of the native population started to decrease significantly. I did enjoy the readout of your conversation with Lloury -- WEIRD is a great acronym. As an aside, you were the second intellectual to talk about so-called French Theory I have read this week. History Reclaimed had a good article about deconstructing French theory. https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/deconstructing-french-theory/ in case you have not seen it. History Reclaimed is a Robert Tombs/ David Abulafia project (both Cambridge professors) and an interesting resource.
