Sunday Morning Reads

It's a soft day, a term my Grandfather used to describe the days weather. There's a steady rain this morning here in the Greater Boston area. It's neither cold nor warm and the rain sort of mists around you as you walk. Yep ... A Soft Day it is.

Long Read of the Week: Undoing the Dis-Education of Millennials By Adam J. MacLeod

I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn. But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors.

They cannot learn until their minds are freed from that prison. This year in my Foundations of Law course for first-year law students, I found my students especially impervious to the ancient wisdom of foundational texts, such as Plato’s Crito and the Code of Hammurabi. Many of them were quick to dismiss unfamiliar ideas as “classist” and “racist,” and thus unable to engage with those ideas on the merits. So, a couple of weeks into the semester, I decided to lay down some ground rules. I gave them these rules just before beginning our annual unit on legal reasoning.

Here is the speech I gave them.

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Before I can teach you how to reason, I must first teach you how to rid yourself of unreason. For many of you have not yet been educated. You have been dis-educated. To put it bluntly, you have been indoctrinated. Before you learn how to think you must first learn how to stop unthinking.

Reasoning requires you to understand truth claims, even truth claims that you think are false

What could possibly be worse than having your daughter stopped by the Massachusetts State Police, then arrested for driving under the influence? ... You're a Judge and State Troopers involved in your daughters arrest had been forced to change their arrest report.
Judge’s Daughter Pleads Guilty To Drunken Driving

Alli Bibaud, at the center of a scandal concerning the scrubbing of a Massachusetts State Police report in connection with her arrest at a crash scene in Worcester in October, pleaded guilty to operating under the influence in Framingham District Court on Friday. She was sentenced to 14 months probation and drug rehabilitation, and she lost her driver’s license for one year.

I'm Guessing No
Is There Room in Feminism for Pro-Israel and Pro-Life Views?

A freshman at Harvard College who identifies herself as a feminist questions whether the new “intersectionality” makes sense — particularly if it leads feminists to read out of their movement supporters of feminism who also support the State of Israel or unborn babies.