tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-357943202026-02-28T00:07:56.293+00:00notes from an exiled academicUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger656125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-66694139134239471232026-01-25T12:37:00.001+00:002026-01-25T12:37:59.169+00:00

I have not found it easy to write the story which follows. I am aware that I live in a society where the ideological trends and taboos which dominated my education still prevail; in fact they are, in many cases, more openly stated and advocated than they were then. There is an immensely strong tendency to criticise parents and to exonerate agents of the state educational system. There is no

Charles McCreeryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05492389576787670462noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-36083557663942884522025-11-12T14:26:00.002+00:002025-11-12T14:29:15.838+00:00

A contributor on Quora.com (Ted Kord) says, as part of his comments on the idea of students being brainwashed by leftist ideology: Now I’d like to circle back to the idea of brainwashing, and why I think that term is not quite appropriate. Institutions of higher learning are certainly advancing one strand of left-wing thought at the expense of other branches of left-wing thought.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-5900149276282830382025-10-06T15:23:00.017+01:002025-10-06T18:33:11.378+01:00

The system of interpretations and evaluations that forms the modern anti-individualistic ideology is now apparently universally understood and applied, so it may be difficult to realise that it is a quite recent development. I was shocked by it when I first started to encounter it at 13 or 14. There was really no hint of it in what I had read up to that time. ‘Socialist’ writers such as H.G.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-13517339917489878512025-09-19T14:54:00.007+01:002025-09-19T15:10:32.048+01:00

The following quotation is from Friedrich Hayek’s book The Fatal Conceit, first published in 1988, about the attitudes of intellectuals to capitalism and socialism. The Condemnation of Profit and the Contempt for Trade The objections of [intellectuals to capitalism ...] do not differ so very much from the objections of members of primitive groups; and it is this that has inclined me to

Christine Fulcherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07310244100574659864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-3647878795128606892025-07-02T19:51:00.006+01:002025-07-02T20:18:46.933+01:00

Extract from an article by Gene Epstein on City Journal: In The Case Against Education, a persuasive indictment of his own industry, George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan quotes Harvard professor Steven Pinker ... ‘A few weeks into every semester,’ says the eminent psychologist and polymath, ‘I face a lecture hall that is half empty, despite the fact that I am

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-25199488624194043382025-04-19T14:17:00.001+01:002025-04-19T14:17:49.978+01:00

All basic religious ideas can be expressed in two forms: one personal and the other existential. In the first case the result is obnoxious, and in the second dangerous to common sense. The human race prefers to consider only the obnoxious versions, whether accepting or rejecting them. To do it justice, it must be admitted that it does not say that the existential versions are dangerous. For the

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comOxford, UK51.7520209 -1.257726323.441787063821153 -36.4139763 80.062254736178843 33.8985237tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-61447407785490063102025-02-17T08:17:00.001+00:002025-02-17T08:17:22.930+00:00

The late Professor Hans Eysenck once told me about an experiment in which a population of rats was divided into ‘bright’ and ‘dull’ on some criterion for rat intelligence. The rat offspring were then switched to different parents, in such a way that the bright rats were given the offspring of the dull rats to bring up, and vice versa. It was found that the bright rats

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comOxford, UK51.7520209 -1.257726323.441787063821153 -36.4139763 80.062254736178843 33.8985237tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-71362098262013564652024-12-17T13:50:00.003+00:002024-12-17T13:50:17.929+00:00

Modern society has lost sight of the only moral principle of any importance, so that the individual citizen is basically unprotected against unlimited oppression. Since the ignored principle is never enunciated, it is difficult to express one’s horror at what already goes on, and at even worse developments that might go on. If someone says, ‘People ought to be heavily taxed in order to pay for

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comOxford, UK51.7520209 -1.257726323.441787063821153 -36.4139763 80.062254736178843 33.8985237tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-43229495794599475992024-10-25T17:28:00.002+01:002024-10-25T17:29:34.063+01:00

guest post by Christine Fulcher Havelock Ellis makes some interesting points about the personality features of geniuses in his book A Study of British Genius (1904). Discussing the characteristics of men and women of genius, he writes: This marked tendency to melancholy among persons of intellectual aptitude is no new observation, but was indeed one of the very earliest points noted concerning

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comOxford, UK51.7520209 -1.257726323.441787063821153 -36.4139763 80.062254736178843 33.8985237tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-60121507930807965022024-09-11T14:16:00.002+01:002024-09-11T14:16:42.103+01:00

Francis Galton (1822-1911), from his book Hereditary Genius: I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comOxford, UK51.7520209 -1.257726323.441787063821153 -36.4139763 80.062254736178843 33.8985237tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-51991300215900762532024-07-13T09:56:00.019+01:002024-07-13T10:04:54.365+01:00

P.G. Wodehouse was one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His most famous fictional creation was Jeeves, the knowing and somewhat manipulative valet to feather-brained young gent Bertie Wooster. In the following extract from Wodehouse’s 1953 novel Ring for Jeeves, Jeeves has temporarily become butler to the impoverished Earl of Rowcester. [Lord Rowcester:] &#

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comOxford, UK51.7520209 -1.257726323.441787063821153 -36.4139763 80.062254736178843 33.8985237tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-704564384938570442024-05-22T11:09:00.002+01:002024-05-22T11:09:32.752+01:00

I have noticed over the last forty years that it has become more and more difficult to find anyone willing to do useful work in a polite and efficient manner. Dissident sociologist David Marsland commented on the work ethic in his 1988 book Seeds of Bankruptcy: Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has been subject to extensive criticism ever since its publication in

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comOxford, UK51.7520209 -1.257726323.441787063821153 -36.4139763 80.062254736178843 33.8985237tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-78162338248857023212024-03-27T13:49:00.001+00:002024-03-27T13:49:56.915+00:00

A young graduate who had read English at Oxford, and with whom I was corresponding, once referred to jokes about ageing. Certainly they are common. The first thing one notices about them is that they all depend on the implicit or explicit introduction of ‘other people’ into the situation. In some way or another, they all say, ‘I am living out a life-cycle as other people have done before, or as

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comOxford, UK51.7520209 -1.257726323.441787063821153 -36.4139763 80.062254736178843 33.8985237tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-78536983052058992052024-01-26T13:58:00.000+00:002024-01-26T13:58:03.369+00:00

It has been estimated that the proportion of a person’s intelligence which is inherited from his or her parents is upward of 50 percent. However, there is great resistance to the idea of heritable intelligence. A theory popular with some academics is that Victorian and Edwardian middle-class intellectuals believed in heritability because it fitted with the view that the class structure of

Celia Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06740450022227490329noreply@blogger.comOxford, UK51.7520209 -1.257726323.441787063821153 -36.4139763 80.062254736178843 33.8985237tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-73765534231994799642023-10-30T14:36:00.002+00:002023-10-30T14:41:45.942+00:00

The idea that ability is partly inherited continues to be controversial, for reasons that seem to have more to do with ideology than scientific evidence. If ability does in general have a heritable component, this would go some way towards explaining the existence of social classes. Hereditary monarchy was for many centuries the most common form of political system, and the heritability of

Celia Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06740450022227490329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-50191259749509938732023-10-13T11:02:00.000+01:002023-10-13T11:02:29.163+01:00

Good parents In order to be a socially approved parent it is necessary not to ‘push’ your child. There is a social myth to the effect that great harm (of a quite unspecified kind) can be done by ‘pushing’ children.    There is no corresponding myth about any harm that can be done by frustrating children; in fact, of course, ‘frustrating’ a child is not a possible concept. Even if

Celia Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06740450022227490329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-29871265386041275172023-09-06T15:18:00.003+01:002023-09-06T16:45:08.912+01:00

One weakness of the pursuit of creativity is that it focuses attention on what seems to you to be significant (which admittedly is the only way you have of evaluating what might be significant), so that the tension between the subject or observer and external (unknown) reality is relatively weakened. This is clearly why creativity is so popular as an educational catchword. If everyone tries to

Celia Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06740450022227490329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-86740682984195562722023-08-02T17:36:00.004+01:002023-10-13T11:16:25.307+01:00

My colleague Charles McCreery has recently published his book on out-of-the-body experiences. This is available from Amazon. Here are links to the Amazon UK page: www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1916090656 and the Amazon USA page: www.amazon.com/dp/1916090656 The book should appeal to anyone interested in any of the following topics: • out-of-the-body experiences • hallucinations and apparitions

Celia Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06740450022227490329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-71629064659557524132023-07-08T14:27:00.000+01:002023-07-08T14:27:18.970+01:00

Here is another extract from Ayn Rand’s book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Rand expresses scepticism about the ‘common good’, a concept popular with collectivists. “The common good” is a meaningless concept, unless taken literally, in which case its only possible meaning is: the sum of the good of all the individual men involved. But in that case, the concept is

Celia Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06740450022227490329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-47307340640342082692023-04-26T15:08:00.001+01:002023-07-08T14:28:56.074+01:00

Ayn Rand was the pen name of Alice O’Connor (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum), a Russian-American writer and philosopher. Her most notable works were the novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). Rand condemned the initiation of force as immoral, and opposed statism and collectivism, but was also against anarchism. She was in favour of laissez-faire capitalism, and was one

Celia Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06740450022227490329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-17156221350398399252023-03-13T15:46:00.005+00:002023-07-24T14:45:19.983+01:00

My new book, The Corpse and the Kingdom, is now available from Amazon. Below is an extract. SECOND INTRODUCTORY SCENARIO What you are perceiving seems to be a physical universe and it seems to be possible to infer certain things about the past history of this universe. It is possible to suppose that your consciousness is a by-product of physical and chemical events in your organism, and

Celia Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06740450022227490329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-38103088527176455322023-01-13T15:42:00.002+00:002023-01-13T15:42:24.863+00:00

Extract from chapter ‘Dozing in the staff room’, in: It’s your time you’re wasting: A teacher’s tales of classroom hell, by Frank Chalk (pseudonym): The group [of teachers] on the next table are discussing one of the ‘Please make me famous, I’m desperate’-type programmes that seem to be on the telly every night these days. When I first started

Celia Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06740450022227490329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-25618294891471451702022-11-01T17:52:00.001+00:002022-11-01T17:52:39.858+00:00

J.S.Mill (1806-1873) As quite a young child, I was under the impression that it was a basic principle of accepted morality and legislation that an individual’s freedom of action should not be restricted except in so far as his actions might impinge upon the freedom of others. A century ago this principle was to a large extent respected. Provided you kept the law you could make your own

Celia Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06740450022227490329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-23104744682567574092022-09-30T15:47:00.002+01:002022-09-30T15:54:22.294+01:00

Part 1 of ‘The basic moral principle’ is here. Having stated the basic moral principle, it can be seen that it is freely violated in modern society. What destroyed my education, and has made it impossible for me to recover from the effects of that destruction ever since, was not au fond the hostility and oppressiveness of any particular individuals, but the intrinsic immorality

Celia Greenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06740450022227490329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35794320.post-214097272332670922022-07-31T16:27:00.000+01:002022-07-31T16:27:02.423+01:00

The power of society depends on the power of the lie. The power of the lie is very great. The power of the individual depends on the right of possession and the sanctity of facts. Neither of these is recognised by society. It is only under capitalism that there is a recognition of the individual’s right to the facts. He has a right to the facts about his possessions. Consequently facts are

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com