The terrorist attacks in Paris last week (and the subsequent arguments about everything from Facebook solidarity to Syrian refugees) reminded me of a powerful essay I read years ago: Education is the Work of Teachers, not Hackers.
Written shortly after the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, the article explores the friction between the growing “unschooling” movement and the need for teachers and the humanities. According to author Leon Wieseltier, the “unschooling” movement champions college dropouts Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg (and countless other tech titans) and is said to assert that “there is no place whatever in this purview for Greek and Latin, because you can’t cut a deal with a multinational in the language of Homer or Virgil.”
Explaining that an ignorant citizen—one without “an ability to reason, a familiarity with argument, a historical memory”—is “a traitor to an open society,” Wieseltier writes:
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