Help America Think Again.

Out of Our Minds: Turning Back the Tide of Anti-Intellectualism in American Schools is the second edition of our book about American culture's ambivalence (one is being generous here) about intellect. This blog is about ideas in the book, and not just about the book. It starts with a few explanations.

What's intellect? It's the common legacy of books, movies, music, science, motor cycle repair, cooking, and so forth. It's the stuff (largely from the past, but active in the present) with which thoughtful people work, and on which they act better. If one fails to think, well, one claims everything and anything is true if and only if one says it.

It's an uncommon definition of intellect, a concept that is often confused with intelligence. And, to our minds, misconstrued as private property. As in: her intellect is bigger than his.

So we argue that intellect is what anyone might read or do mindfully. Intellect rests in libraries, quite famously: brick-and-mortar or digitially, say Wikipedia or Project Guttenberg. It also lives in families and communities in order habits of civility and mutual helping: in everyday thoughtful practices. And these practices include thinking about how to make things and do things. Yes, one does well to argue that reading, reflection (extended bouts of thinking), and an openness to new ideas and ways of existing on earth strengthens and sustains the everyday intellect-in-action.

It's also try that intellect isn't just books and documents. Anna Karenina (the great novel by Tolstoy) is only great to readers who find it so. All these things need living humanity to engage them, take them in, love them, work with them, and extend their meanings. In their lives, in the economics, in their politics, in the cultures, and in their own histories.

This project of ours includes the book, but goes well beyond it. In particular, we have always written about the intersection of schooling with culture, politics, history, and economics.

Right now these matters, and this intersection, seems particularly relevant and particularly important. Perhaps urgent is good word for it. One can argue that American democracy has collapsed, the large corporations are now more firmly in charge of the State than ever (and they have been in charge for many decades), and even that failure to develop intellect--as a key feature of the common good--is one of the root causes.

So we'll add focused reflections here, about the mind, about the project of education as helping people think (ourselves included), about skepticism, about cultural margins, and about the evolving threats to intellect, to the intellectual legacy, and to everyday thinking and thoughtfulness generally.