Tag: Niall Ferguson

Pseudo-education as a weapon: Beyond the ridiculous in linguistic prescriptivism

by Dominik Lukeš ·

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Teacher in primary school in northern Laos (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption] Most of us are all too happy to repeat clichés about education to motivate ourselves and others to engage in this liminal ritual of mass socialization. One such phrase is "knowledge is power". It is used to refer not just to…

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Killer App is a bad metaphor for historical trends, good for pseudoteaching

by Dominik Lukeš ·

Niall Ferguson wrote in The Guardian some time ago about how awful history education has become with these "new-fangled" 40-year-old methods like focusing on "history skills" that leads to kids leaving school knowing "unconnected fragments of Western history: Henry VIII and Hitler, with a small dose of Martin Luther King, Jr." but not who was…

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