Sublime

twenty pages in length during the entire year.

Several years ago the students of Stanford voted him the best teacher on the faculty, which must have enraged his colleagues because you cannot maintain proper status in an American university without cultivated mediocrity. You must be academically “sound,” which is to be preposterously and phenomenally dull. Once I had a professor who was teaching

Active Reading

Mill held that truth emerges from an unfettered competition of ideas and that individual character is most improved when allowed to find its own way uncoerced. That vision was insufficient for 20th-century American liberalism.

America is, in fact, the leading case in point of what may be thought of as the third great crisis in Western education.

Seven years later, at the height of his public influence, he repeated the value he placed on those committed to the life of the mind. In an October 1963 speech at Amherst College, he would say, “The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispens

The political philosopher Danielle Allen makes a powerful argument that the fundamental purpose of the American public education system is to ensure an informed citizenry.

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.

John Milton—later the author of Paradise Lost—published a pamphlet in which he argued against a law passed by Parliament requiring printers to secure licenses from the government for everything they printed. No book should be censored before publication, Milton argued (though it might be condemned after printing), because truth could only be establ