This article about “wokeness, free speech, and the role of education” is more like a book summary than an article — it’s packed. Here is Roger Simon writing at American Greatness:
This essay is adapted from a talk earlier in February delivered at the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom and the American Culture and Ideas Initiative at the University of Arizona.
Conservatives have rightly lamented the assault on free speech that is such a conspicuous and disfiguring reality of life in America today. But that loss only achieves its true significance in the context of a more fundamental erosion: the erosion of a shared political consensus that gives life to “We, the People.”
Back in New York, we have recently started an informal reading group at The New Criterion and Encounter Books. If that sounds dull, let me add that I have combined the reading with a little seminar on wine appreciation. At the moment, our palettes are padding around Bordeaux, learning to discriminate reliably among Paulliac, Saint-Estèphe, and Saint-Julien. Soon we’ll move east to the Right Bank and then further afield.
At the same time, we are in the midst of reading Plato’s Republic, a book about nearly everything, including a major theme of my remarks today: the role of education.
I thank my host Dan Asia for supplying the title of my talk, and I will get around to touching on all of its elements. In the meantime, I want to point out a certain ambiguity or incompleteness about the phrase “the role of education.” One immediately wants to know, “the role of education” in what? In free speech? In the perpetuation of wokeness? Perhaps this is the place to issue a trigger warning to the effect this talk is definitely not “woke.” Anyone anxious about being offended may leave with impunity.
Read more: American Greatness
