Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Adolescence

  • The Ethics of Compulsory Education — And Public Schooling Too — With Crispin Sartwell

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson College) returns to Sophia to talk about the issues he has with compulsory, state-sponsored k-12 education. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYm03FISkM4&ab_channel=ElectricAgora 10:50 – Crispin’s schooling experience in Washington DC 20:20 – The tension between learning and compulsion / Formal Compulsion and oppressive atmospheres 25:50 – Compulsion of minors considered more generally…

  • Two Bad Ideas of the Morally (Self) Righteous

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ The spectacle of moralizers being exposed as moral cretins themselves is something that everyone who remembers the televangelist scandals of the last several decades will be familiar with. Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Ted Haggard…, in each case it was discovered that a prominent person, who had spent a good portion…

  • Peak Woke Philosophy

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ After bearing witness to the train wreck that was the “White Paper on Publication Ethics,” I was convinced that woke philosophy couldn’t possibly get any worse.  I was wrong, of course, and in hindsight, it was foolish of me even to have imagined such a thing.  After all, I had…

  • Politics and the Expression of the Adolescent Id

    I appeared on Aryeh-Cohen Wade’s “Culturally Determined” program, on BloggingHeads.TV, where we discussed my essay, “Adolescent Politics.” Along the way, we talked about Donald Trump, Joan Didion, and the impact of social media on politics.

  • Adolescent Politics

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ The sub-heading of the late-Christopher Hitchens’ book, God is Not Great, reads: “how religion poisons everything.”  Now, maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t.  I really don’t know.  But one thing I do know is this: Politics poisons everything. And the reason it does is that we are not serious…

  • Breaking Kids

    Don’t you ever feel like everything we do and everything we’ve been taught is just to service the future? — Marissa Ribisi as “Cynthia,” Dazed and Confused (Dir: Richard Linklater, 1993) ___ No sixteen or seventeen year old can have a “resume.”  Or should have one.  Resumes are things that adults submit when trying to…