A future is coming in which you will be judged based on what you know and can demonstrate, not what piece of paper you got and from where. i.e. "my major is X from Y uni" We need to push through. Far too many students come through school learning actually nothing. I don't mean "basically nothing" I mean zilch, nada, nothing. Those who do learn things often gain some "knowledge" that is not knowledge. A gain which is truly a loss.

They become confused.

Their souls terraformed into smaller, more sterile, more utilitarian-friendly versions of the human soul. This goes hand in hand with a cognitive decline in the lost opportunity to begin an engagement with reality as humans who by nature reach out to know only to find all knowledge inflected by the cynical appeals to political and market oriented needs. What they learn is "I exist for the sake of others" but not in a generative and self giving way. It is a cruel parody of charity. This form of learning is less than nothing. It is an emptying of the humanity of the student. It is wrong and it must stop.

What will take its place?

At first it will be a rediscovery of actual learning by individuals/small groups of friends. People who by nature desire to know and who push through the system, beyond the walls, driven by an unquenched thirst for truth/goodness. A thirst left thirstier by the salt of modern ed. Beyond the wall they'll find a few philosophers hiding just outside the walls in their shacks. Refugees of the old system. And from the joy of the conversations they have there they will begin trying to translate what they are talking about into beautiful works of writing. The conversations will grow, some of these venturers will decide they need to set up organizations, a counter polis, to carry on the conversation. These organizations are already in existence, this is where we are in the process.

I see new organizations, I see this happening all over the internet. Non-exhaustive list, and please add your own:

These networks are expanding the genuine search for truth and goodness far and wide. I have young people email me, young people in good colleges, who say unashamedly "I got my entire education on the internet". The collapse of higher ed is underway. It is upon us. We need to begin planning to preserve and transmit and grow what remains of humane knowledge for a future which we will not see. And we need to consider what it means to come together as a broad umbrella of organizations to ask the more structural questions that need to be resolved. What went wrong? Can we rebuild in such a way to avoid the same fate? How do we plan to offer an actual humane education to the ~20 million college students currently in the US? What about the rest of the world?

It is the Wild West at the moment in higher ed, and getting wilder. Strap on your six shooter and saddle up gentlemen. When the law becomes lawless we must become The Law unto ourselves. We ride at dawn.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh