WHERE IS THE HUMANIT(IES)? In this no-holds-barred wordfest, Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, unloads on the notion of unschooling. His primary target is Dale J. Stephens and the thoughts Stephens puts forth in his book, Hacking Your Education. Wieseltier takes special offense to the notion of "hackademics" -- an entrepreneurial try-and-fail approach to learning -- which he perceives to be strongly lacking in Humanities. "Entrepreneurship is not a full human education, and living is never just succeeding, and the humanities are always pertinent. In pain or in sorrow, who needs a quant?,"asks Wieseltier. To be fair, entrepreneurship often presents a form of pain and sorrow that whiz kids might never realize otherwise, and surely schools share some blame for making humanities archaic and uninteresting. But when Wieseltier says the "Web-inebriated movement to abandon study for wealth, is another document of the unreality of Silicon Valley" we can only scratch our heads-- and cheer for the folks who are actually trying to make a difference. Hear all of his thoughts on unschooling, homeschooling, the denigration of teachers on the New Republic website.
