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Education

Charlton on Tolkien and Rowling

Bruce Charlton unfavorably compares the moral universe of Harry Potter with the Lord of the Rings. When first I tried to read the Harry Potter series, I was put off by the chaos of its moral universe. The author did not seem to have secure moral bearings, and it seemed

Genius!

Terry Teachout rags on the 10,000 hour rule in the Wall Street Journal. The problem with the 10,000-hour rule is that many of its most ardent proponents are political ideologues who see the existence of genius as an affront to their vision of human equality, and will do

Number, Gender, and Case

From John D Cook comes this Grammar cheat sheet at Retinart. The opening warning reawakened in me a realization: Please Note I originally wrote this article for myself alone. It served as my way of learning the rules of language. The fact that it got some attention mostly bothers me,

Now, Back to our regularly scheduled program

Sivers' post on learning musical composition at an accelerate rate is fascinating to me. Sivers is clearly an extraordinary human being. Looking around his site, I found a bit on shortening the time between thinking and doing, challenging himself, and doing what scares you. Sivers has created a great

And now for something completely different

In the comments on my Generic Degrees post, Tom gives an example of how law school increased his conscientiousness. I can be dismissive of the value of hard work [blame Malcolm Gladwell], but hard work is at least as important in modern life as intellectual ability. If not more so.

Critical Thinking

Browsing through the comments on the last post I linked to, I was struck by the first one: Based on my grad and undergrad at elite schools (and classes taken at an excellent community college and excellent regional university while I was in high school), my belief was that college

Generic Degrees

From Confessions of a Community College Dean: Ask the Administrator: The Generic Degree An occasional correspondent writes: Some jobs out there are advertised as requiring a college degree, but the employers don't care what was actually studied. So these employers are in effect using college as a four-year