Greetings everyone,
This week’s newsletter at a glance:
The 2 Purposes of Education
Cal Newport’s thoughts on ChatGPT
Two Essays on Rhetoric from the Late Richard Weaver
Hope you’re having a good weekend!
No one has given his children anything better than adab (knowledge on morals and etiquette)
—Imam at-Tirmidhi (825-892)
✏️ Education & The Individual
One of the hallmarks of a desirable & functioning society is a useful education system. Many people from less fortunate geographical situations leave behind family, friends, and familiarity to seek better educational opportunities abroad. But what makes an education system useful is not an simple question to answer. It calls into question the purpose of formal education for the individual and the place of societal intervention in said education.
The first purpose of education is to prepare one for ‘real life’. By real life, I am referring to everyday life in a given societal environment, (ex. life in a Nordic Western country, or conservative Middle Eastern state). People who complain that ‘school doesn’t prepare us for life’ are in essence advocating for this type of educational system: one that places precedent in skills, knowledge, and mental models that help one to assimilate into their given environment. Things like personal finance classes, cooking and cleaning courses, and things of that nature are examples of educational initiatives that satisfy this goal.
The second purpose for education is seen more often in universities and higher institutions (at least in theory, I reckon in practice not so much anymore). This purpose is based on the idea that education is meant to be the fertile soil from which individuals can pursue truth and develop their inner life. When we learn ‘useless’ skills like calculus, geometry, and Newtonian physics in school, we are receiving an education that serves this second goal at expense of the first. We learn the fundamental knowledge that has advanced human knowledge of the world, and give ourselves the tools and knowledge to uncover new truths of life. Philosophy, rhetoric, and liberal education at large also fall under this category. What they lack in practical everyday application they make up for in depth, substance, and the desire for truth. This type of education prepares one for life after death, in the sense that, in developing strong critical thinking abilities and a robust internal moral compass, we are capable of making difficult of decisions in the name of truth and righteousness. Even if such decisions come at the expense of our own lives.
There is a place for both educational systems — perhaps a blend of both is necessary. But the second must oversee the first: all great and free societies are built by an ethos of liberality and individuality that dictates the nature of our societies. From those societies, the practicalities arise, but we should be more concerned with raising free-thinking men and women who can craft, question, and conduct our societies in the right direction. In whatever way the individual deems best.
nemo nisi per amicitiam cognoscitur — no one learns except by friendship.
💡 Food for Thought
Is credentialism a necessary evil?
🔗 Sunday Best
Cal Newport’s Thoughts on ChatGPT
ChatGPT is almost certainly not going to take your job. Once you understand how it works, it becomes clear that ChatGPT’s functionality is crudely reducible to the following: it can write grammatically-correct text about an arbitrary combination of known subjects in an arbitrary combination of known styles, where “known” means it encountered it sufficiently many times in its training data. This ability can produce impressive chat transcripts that spread virally on Twitter, but it’s not useful enough to disrupt most existing jobs. The bulk of the writing that knowledge workers actually perform tends to involve bespoke information about their specific organization and field. ChatGPT can write a funny poem about a peanut butter sandwich, but it doesn’t know how to write an effective email to the Dean’s office at my university with a subtle question about our hiring policies.
Two Essays by Richard Weaver
Language is Sermonic & The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric
No one can live a life of direction and purpose without some scheme of values. As rhetoric confronts us with choices involving values, the rhetorician is a preacher to us, noble if he tries to direct our passion toward noble ends and base if he uses our passion to confuse and degrade us. Since all utterance influences us in one or the other of these directions, it is important that the direction be the right one, and it is better if this lay preacher is a master of his art.
A Grammar of Tolerance
An Essay by Shakyh Hamza Yusuf
Reading has four levels: understanding the outline of the piece; “coming to terms” with the author, meaning that one understands terms as the author intended; understanding the propositions, their arguments, and evidence supporting them; and finally, responding with the appropriate etiquette. This last phase, which Dr. Mortimer Adler describes as “talking back” to the author, is the most difficult level of reading. It is the ability to criticize with understanding, giving your reasons for dissent, and supporting them with counterarguments, but this last and problematic phase of reading is entirely predicated upon mastery of the first three. At this level, criticism means disagreeing with all or part of an author’s assumptions, logic, or conclusions based on an accurate and contextual reading of his work. One of the mysteries of the mind leaves us unable to discern our own errors while witnessing those of others—hence, dialectic’s importance as a means to enable one to see one’s errors through the mirror of the other.
The man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Thanks for coming!
AT