David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

Attention, fellow nerds: How are we doing with ‘normal’ people?

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I love being part of groups with so many intelligent people. I confess quite freely that I’m a little nerdy. Sometimes … well … a lot nerdy. Or maybe geeky. Books excite me. Television doesn’t. I prefer to talk about ideas rather than argue about who should be starting at quarterback for the DoofusDogs.

As a long-time libertarian, I’ve enjoyed the benefits of being part of a group with a rich intellectual tradition. Being able to read amazing exposition of ideas and have rich intellectual conversations with my friends is something I’ve treasured for more than 20 years. We have great think tanks and books and websites and all sorts of resources — as long as your brain works in the same hyper-rational way that most libertarian brains work.

But let’s be honest. We’re not doing so well with mainstream audiences. Why not? I think we’re so focused on our ideas — and on arguing with each other and winning intellectual debates with our opponents — that we’re not very good at actually doing things. We’re very good at producing 74-page white papers on a subject, but we’re not as good at finding real-world ways of implementing the things we talk so much about.

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If the state didn’t wither away for Marx and Engels, is there really a post-statist era ahead now?

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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously predicted that the state would wither away after the working class seized power, although we saw in real life that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” created a stronger and stronger state. That’s because Marx and Engels saw the state existing simply to regulate class conflict. Since class conflict was going to be gone — with the “working class” clearly in charge — there would be no state. That was a fantasy at the time.

I keep talking lately about a post-statist world, and it’s time to be a little more specific about what that means. Am I predicting that all governments are suddenly going to cease existing? No, that’s not it. To make my point clear, I’m going to compare it to another controversial assertion that’s been made lately.

Nearly three months ago — following up on something he’d been talking about for nearly a year — Apple CEO Steve Jobs asserted that the computer industry has entered what he called the “post-PC era.” Outraged commentators screamed that he was crazy — because the PC was still the dominant computing device in the market. A few others got it. Eventually, I think everybody will understand what he was talking about.

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If you care about education — not just schooling — please read this paper right now

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For years now, I’ve struggled with finding a way to adequately explain all the things that I see wrong with how we handle education and what steps we could take to fix them. I don’t have to try anymore, because anyone who’s willing to read this paper by Michael Strong will pretty much know what I would have said if I were actually qualified to talk about it — and it’s clear that Strong is both qualified and passionate to talk about it.

This paper was published almost four years ago, but I never knew about it until the author gave me the link Monday. After suffering through dozens of mediocre articles and podcasts about education over the past decade or so, I have to say that this one is going to be my new starting point to recommend to people who are willing to read 23 pages of well-written and gripping prose. And — let’s be honest — if you don’t care enough to read just 23 pages, you don’t really care that much about education.

The thing that makes this paper so worthy of your time is that it’s not just about achieving better test scores, as many modern conservatives want. It’s not just about helping students develop as human beings, as many modern liberals want. It’s about integrating information, critical thinking skills, culture and more into something that can create better lives in the real world. And it’s this sort of properly integrated person who will take the lead in building the post-statist world I’ve been talking about. So I’ll shut up — if you’ll just go read this PDF now. It’s worth it.

Change This – The Creation of Conscious Culture through Educational Innovation.

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