Sublime

As James Davison Hunter, the country’s leading scholar on character education, put it, “American culture is defined more and more by an absence, and in that absence, we provide children with no moral horizons beyond the self and its well-being.” Religious institutions, which used to do this, began to play a less prominent role in American life. Par

The cases of two scholars, Rebecca Tuvel and Bruce Gilley, immediately come to mind. Tuvel wrote a paper for the feminist philosophy giant Hypatia, exploring parallels between transracial and transgender identities and advocating transracial identity statuses. However, for Theory, race and gender are profoundly different. To claim transgender statu

I figured Professor Haidt would speak about moral psychology, the theme of his book. But instead, on the day of the talk, Haidt discussed the purpose of a university. He urged the audience to consider whether the aim of higher education is to protect students or to equip them with the ability to seek truth, and he was clearly in favor of the latter

Even if madness is at the root of some of the world’s great creations, it is hard to imagine that if someone asked each of us to live an entire life of suffering in the service of the arts, we would agree to do so. Even if we might choose such altruism, it’s unlikely we would allow anyone else to make that decision for us.

Our schools allow kids less exercise. They allow kids less play. They create more anxiety, because of the frenzy of tests. They don’t create conditions where kids can find their intrinsic motivations. And for many kids, we don’t give them opportunities to develop mastery—the sense they are good at something.