News – Page 154 – Quixotic Pedagogue

Why We’re Americans Today

It was the work of a couple of cartographers:

We call ourselves Americans today because of the map’s makers, Martin Waldseemüller and Mathias Ringmann, young clerics in the cathedral village of St.-Dié, France. By incorporating early New World discoveries, their map reached beyond the canonical descriptions of Old World geography handed down from Ptolemy in the second century. On a lower stretch of the southern continent, the mapmakers inscribed the name “America” in the mistaken belief that Amerigo Vespucci, not Columbus, deserved credit for first sighting a part of that continent, South America.

Or possibly they favored Vespucci because he held more firmly to the growing consensus that this was indeed a New World, not the Indies (as Columbus so wanted to believe), and because he wrote more colorfully than Columbus about the people he encountered.

March 29, 2013/by dpogreba

An Excellent Summary of Existentialism

Debate Class

From Gary Cox’s How to Be an Existentialist or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses:

None of us are fixed entities like chairs or stones, but indeterminate, ambiguous beings in constant process of becoming and change. We are all free and can’t stop being free. We are all responsible for our actions and our lives are fraught with desire, guilt and anxiety, especially anxiety about our being-for-others. That is, our anxiety about what other people think of us. This leads us to suffer such irksome emotions as guilt, shame and embarrassment. And, if all this isn’t bad enough, we are doomed to die from the moment we are born into a meaningless universe where God is at least very elusive and at most downright non-existent.

Strange to say, despite heaping up this long, grim list, existentialism is ultimately a positive, optimistic, anti-nihilistic philosophy! I kid you not. So why? Well, because it outlines how you can go on to live an honest and worthwhile life in spite of the fact that human existence is ultimately pointless and absurd. The general idea is that you can’t create a genuinely honest and worthwhile life for yourself on the basis of a fairytale. You have to build your life on an understanding and acceptance of how things really are, otherwise you will always be fooling and deluding yourself as you hanker after impossibilities like complete happiness and total fulfillment.

March 28, 2013/by dpogreba

Accelerated College Degrees Would Save Trillions

Daily Wisdom

Writing in The American, Reuven Brenner argues that we need to reject the traditional four year model for a college degree:

There are at least 16 million youngsters enrolled in post-secondary education, with approximately 4 million graduating every year. Assume that from now on, each year, 4 million students join the labor force a year earlier. Each generation would stay one year longer in the labor force. How much annual income and how much wealth would this generate?

Assume that after graduation the average salary would be just $20,000 and remain there. With 4 million students finishing one year earlier, this would add $80 billion to the national income during that year. Or at an average annual income of $40,000, it would add $160 billion. Assume now that the additional $80 billion in national income would be compounding at 7 percent over the next 40 years. This would then amount to an additional $1.2 trillion of wealth – for just one generation of 4 million students joining the labor force a year earlier at a $20,000 salary. At $40,000, this would amount to $2.4 trillion by the fortieth year – again, for just one generation of 4 million people joining the labor force a year earlier. The added wealth depends on how rosy one makes the assumptions about salaries or compounding rates. Add 10, 20, or 30 generations, each starting to work a year earlier, and the numbers run into the tens of trillions of dollars.

March 28, 2013/by dpogreba

Latest News