"Learning by Doing"

Maria Farrell [the past] has written a long post defending "literary fiction" as description of the world.

Laurie Paul, known as an expert on mereology, is now studying "transformative experience"

And we're back, once again to Zadie Smith, and Hannah Arendt

Henry Farrell,

John Gray on the disappearance of utopian dreams of social reform in science fiction here. His taste in SF is excellent and he has several good lines.

The role of science has been to gauge the limits of the species, with new technologies and extra-planetary environments being used as virtual laboratories for an ongoing thought experiment. If the mainstream novel employs the lens of the commonplace career – birth and education, marriage and divorce, ambition and failure – SF has pursued the inquiry by abducting the human animal and placing it in alien environments.

is particularly nice. It captures real (if not universal) differences without fetishizing the one as better than the other.

read my additional comments at the link.

The fading of scholasticism begins in the family.

history/related.  Following the Arendt link, and another, will get you here.

"I think a major consequence of the lack of reading non-fiction other than textbooks is that when in late high school or college teachers want research paper type things, the students have a lot of trouble largely because they've never read any."

"lots of Americans read very poorly and schools teach reading almost exclusively through fiction"