In this episode, Scott and Michael discuss:
-current events and recent public letters to some private high schools
-some ideas about racism and attempts to deal with it today: the good and the bad
-racism (all bad, no good to it)
-the philosophic and historical roots of some of these bad attempts
-the social vs. the metaphysical
-the practicality of some of these attempts
-how they affects our children
-how, in truth and in reality, to deal with racism

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About Scott:
Scott K. Harris (https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-k-harris-b037966) has a Bachelor of Arts in History/Psychology from Texas State University and a Master’s in Education from Lamar University. He received the Mirabeau B. Lamar Award for Teaching Excellence, and was the first teacher in Texas to receive the Quality School Teacher Award.

"In his 29th year of teaching, Harris has taught U.S. History, World History, Psychology, A.P. Psychology, A.P. Macroeconomics, Philosophy, and International Baccalaureate’s capstone course Theory of Knowledge. He also coached swimming and water polo for 17 years.

"Harris has guest-lectured at Texas State in Philosophy, and at the University of Texas San Antonio’s graduate school in Education. For nearly two decades he was a member of the Mind Science Foundation and the National Association of Scholars.

"Harris piloted curriculum for what is now John Stossel-in-the-Classroom, serves as a consultant to Free- to-Choose Media, and is an associate producer for Izzit.org, all of which produce videos advocating liberty and economic education."


Contact Scott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-k-harris-b037966

Contact Michael:
1. reasonrxpodcast@aol.com
2. http://www.goldams.com
3. https://www.facebook.com/EpistemeRx/
4. https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-gold-2883921/




Show notes
1. "Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.
...
"If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, “brethren!” Be careful, teachers!”

--Martin Luther King, Jr. (From MLK’s 1947 article “The Purpose of Education,” published in the Morehouse College campus newspaper The Maroon Tiger. See: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/purpose-education)

2. "Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment—and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem)." -- Ayn Rand (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/racism.html)

3. "Dad who wrote scathing letter to Brearley about race focus: ‘Someone had to’ " by Dana Kennedy (17 April 2021)
https://nypost.com/2021/04/17/dad-who-wrote-letter-to-brearley-about-race-focus-someone-had-to/

4. "You Have to Read This Letter" by Bari Weiss (16 April 2021)
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/you-have-to-read-this-letter

5. "One Parent of New York City Indoctrination School Has Had Enough" (17 April 2021)
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2021/04/17/one-parent-of-new-york-city-indoctrination-school-has-had-enough/

6. "Parents anger as $45,000-a-year Brentwood School scraps Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird for new anti-racism curriculum" (19 April 2021)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9489139/Brentwood-School-locked-ideological-struggle-canceling-Kill-Mockingbird.html

7. "The Miseducation of America’s Elites: Affluent parents, terrified of running afoul of the new orthodoxy in their children’s private schools, organize in secret." by Bari Weiss (9 March 2021)
https://www.city-journal.org/the-miseducation-of-americas-elites?wallit_nosession=1

8. The Website "New Discourses: Pursuing the light of objective truth in subjective darkness. Translations from the Wokish"
https://newdiscourses.com/translations-from-the-wokish/

9. Michel Foucault
a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
b. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michel-Foucault
c. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/
d. https://iep.utm.edu/foucault/

10. Karl Marx
a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_philosophy
b. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
c. https://iep.utm.edu/socialis/
d. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/communism.html

11. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel
b. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/
c. https://iep.utm.edu/hegelsoc/

12. Immanuel Kant
a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant
b. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/
c. philosophy of mind: https://iep.utm.edu/kantmind/
d. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/kant,_immanuel.html

13. Plato's Republic
a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_(Plato)
b. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/
c. https://iep.utm.edu/republic/
d. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/platonic_realism.html

14. John Dewey
a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey
b. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey/
c. https://iep.utm.edu/dewey/
d. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/pragmatism.html

15. The Khmer Rouge
a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
b. https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/the-khmer-rouge
c. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Khmer-Rouge
d. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1879785,00.html
e. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-are-the-khmer-rouge-killing-fields.html

16. The Great Leap Forward
a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
b. https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Leap-Forward
c. https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/great-leap-forward-mao-zedong/
d. https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/modern-world-history-1918-to-1980/china-1900-to-1976/the-great-leap-forward/

17. "The Weimar Renaissance"
a. https://www.britannica.com/place/Germany/The-Weimar-Renaissance
b. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_culture

18. "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut
a. http://tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
b. https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt
c. https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxtc3JlZG1hbmVuZ2xpc2h8Z3g6MjdlZjYzZmNmMjFjMjgxZA

19. "The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave "
https://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Frederick-Douglass-Narrative-American/dp/1979854440

20. "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
Frederick Douglass (1845)"
a. https://resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/SAYLOR-ENGL405-7.2-DOUGLASS.pdf
b. https://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Douglass/Narrative/Douglass_Narrative.pdf
c. http://mrbecker9.weebly.com/uploads/4/8/5/7/4857123/frederickdouglassfulltext.pdf

21. "In the Heat of the Night" (1967), starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061811/

22. "Gentleman's Agreement," staring Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039416/

23. "Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors."

Bio and image courtesy of Scott Harris.