An evocative quotation from philosopher Sidney Hook (1902-1989), from his autobiographical Out of Step. In an earlier post I quoted Hook’s account of his family’s living conditions. Here Hook recalls his authoritarian-style education in American schools circa one century ago: “Although the public schools were religiously attended (children feared the wrath of their parents much […]
Sidney Hook on public education Read More »
Re-reading E. G. West’s classic Education and the State, which plunges into the current and historical debates over private and government education. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we grant that the government has obligation to protect children and that growing up ignorant is one of the things the government should protect children against.
Driver’s education and the government-schooling debates Read More »
What makes entrepreneurs tick? An interesting paper: “Anatomy of an Entrepreneur: Family Background and Motivation”, by Vivek Wadhwa et al., part of the Kauffman Foundation Small Research Projects. The paper’s abstract: “Entrepreneurs are among the most celebrated people in our culture. Celebrity entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, often
Entrepreneurs’ family background and motivation Read More »
From Abraham Maslow’s Maslow on Management (Ann R. Kaplan, 1998): “The key question isn’t What fosters creativity? But is it Why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not Why do people create but Why do people not create
Maslow on natural creativity — quotation Read More »
Episodes: The full playlist. Stephen R. C. Hicks, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, USA, and has had visiting positions at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the University of Kasimir the Great in Poland, Oxford University’s Harris Manchester College in England, and Jagiellonian University in Poland.
This quotation from twentieth-century education theorist Jean Piaget — “Play is the answer to how anything new comes about” — reminds me of a passage from seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education. “Great care is to be taken, that [education] be never made as a business to him, nor he look on it
Piaget and Locke on play and creativity Read More »
The teenaged Rodin applied for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts. But: “Rodin, who competed for the first time at seventeen, failed to gain admission — not once but three times within eighteen months. The humiliation of these rebuffs was scarcely lessened by the fact that the examiners acknowledged his gift for drawing but rejected
Art school reject: Auguste Rodin Read More »
The hard part about writing about education can be getting past all of the clichés. Excellence. Truth. Honor. Tradition. The Future. Yet those words do capture essential aspirations for education, especially for those of us at the kind of college Rockford is and can be. I want to focus here on excellence. All of my
Rockford University professor Stephen Hicks’s advice to new students Read More »