George Mason
I was reading and writing in a wifi-equipped cafe nearby when people around me started whooping and hollering over what was being broadcast on the television. George Mason University had won a basketball game. A lady at a nearby table asked who George Mason was, so I told her. Now I find out that whatever it was that they won has served to focus attention on that academic things they do there, too, especially the economics department (chaired by my friend Don Boudreaux), as this Washington Post article demonstrates.
I don’t give a hoot about “March Madness,” but nevertheless am excited to see that GMU has done so well. I hope they win the next two — and also hope this won’t lead them to shift funds from econ & law & public choice to BB scholarships. GMU does great work in a number of disciplines.
Utterly unrelated — I’ve posted the report from the OSCE observer in Belarus on my blog for anyone interested.
That’s at http://unforeseencontingencies.blogspot.com/2006/03/osce-election-observer-visits-soviet.html
Very interesting reading.
School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that teachers should be able to teach in comfort.
Leo Tolstoy
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of education have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.
~Albert Einstein.
My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
~George Bernard Shaw
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
~H.L. Mencken
It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.
~Benito Mussolini
Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils… and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation.
~Bernhard Rust, Nazi Minister of Education
Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.
~ Ludwig von Mises
“Education, eh?” has a rather jaundiced view of education generally, but it’s not clear that it tells us much about the research or educational functions of higher education. I doubt that much molding of character goes on at the university level; if anything, universities promote something rather different from from the civic virtue, however understood, and instead are more likely to teach an amalgam of anti-values.
Regardless, I was interested in how a basketball game had turned attention to the academic programs of a university, something that I found rather curious.