CxD#261: Problems with Education + Tricksters Needed! 🦊 + 📚'23 #28: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ What Nietzsche Really Said

1. Few things shape character more than the education we receive as young beings, and fewer things are as ass-kettle-over-tea-cup backwards as our schools and educational structures.
   

   This review below is an in-depth critique of the way we teach— privileging either socialization, truth, or development, and why these aims don’t work.

   

   
   Radical alternatives are presented!

   

   
   In itself, it is a book review of the book The Educated Mind, but this particular book review won the book review contest over at Astral Codex, where really smart people who know things write extraordinary thoughtful reviews that are in themselves something close to books —often extraordinarily inspiring books. This is one of those.

Your Book Review: The Educated Mind

2. The 28th book of the year that I’ve read debunks some common misunderstandings about Nietzsche’s philosophy and implied views. Part of the problem, however, is that Nietzsche is a deliberately polemical and contradictory writer who privileged the act of inquiry over finding final answers. But for those of you who have heard the rumors and hearsay about what he was going on about, but don’t know what’s accurate and what’s fable, it’s an informative and enjoyable read.

However, I’m not sure I agree with some of the authors’ analysis of his philosophy, and this is not the space to delve into those issues— that’s something for what I aim to do over at Fire Philosophy— so a ⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating seems apt for this pretty good introductory-style text.

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3. “To slow down in times of crisis—times that in so many ways require action on all fronts—can seem counterintuitive. We are constantly met with pressures to achieve more, act faster and be better.
   

   Dr. Bayo Akomolafe disagrees. Urgent times, he urges, call for quiet; for rest and respite. Instead of ramping up, we must surrender, and wait to witness the transformative potential of stillness. Dr. Akomolafe is a writer, poet, teacher, and public intellectual, whose groundbreaking philosophies draw on his roots with the Yoruba people to look beyond perceived certainties and obfuscate binary thinking. The first step toward emancipatory wholeness is finding comfort in the unknowable, and embracing bewilderment and wonder.
   

   “In pursuing justice, we’re reinforcing the system we’re trying to escape. In trying to climb out of the pits that we’ve dug for ourselves, the pits become resilient. In trying to escape the prison, the prison gains its form. So, in a very critical sense, we are in a crisis of form,” said Dr. Akomolafe. “We need trickster approaches, we need ways of dancing away, or dancing to, fugitive spaces; dancing to sanctuaries where we can shape-shift. Grieving, mourning, even allowing ourselves to partake in pleasurable activities in the face of the storm.”