With a holiday to break up the week, you would think there would be less important news to report. On the contrary, however, there is more — as the information about Dr. Noriko Arai demonstrates:
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| Dr. Noriko Arai (新井紀子) |
• Noriko H. Arai (新井紀子) on a New Learning.
After seeing a short segment featuring Dr. Noriko Arai on Direct Talk (a
show on NHK World, the Japanese public television channel), we did an internet
search and found this “Ted
Talk” by her presenting her findings from her “Todai Robot” and her
concerns about current education. In
most countries today (although she was focusing primarily on Japan), students
memorize vast amounts of data — which any computer can do better, e.g., “Watson”
on the “Jeopardy Challenge” — but often fail to understand meaning, that is,
they do not really comprehend what they “learn” in any meaningful sense. Applying Dr. Arai’s findings to the
difficulties experienced with getting people to accept the Just Third Way of
Economic Personalism, we can suddenly understand why, when they are presented
with (for example) the principles of binary economics as explained by Louis
Kelso and Mortimer Adler, or the laws and characteristics of social justice as
explained by Pope Pius XI and CESJ co-founder Father William Ferree, people
either look blank, run away, or attack.
Confronted with something that is outside of their store of accumulated “knowledge”
of the way things are that they have memorized, they do not have the intellectual
tools they need to comprehend anything outside their current frame of reference. It is not enough to demand that they tell us
what is wrong with what we are saying. “What’s
wrong” as far as they are concerned is that the Just Third Way is simply
incomprehensible to them and they necessarily react as they do to any other
threat, triggering the “fight or flight” mechanism. What needs to change — and change soon, as
Dr. Arai noted — is how young people (and anyone else) are educated. Without a Justice University to teach
fundamental principles of reason and understanding from the earliest years,
beginning with parents teaching their infants, the world is heading toward an
intellectual Armageddon, not to exaggerate.
• CESJ Board/Executive Committee Meeting/Community Forum. CESJ held its 428th consecutive meeting
this past Monday, November 25, divided into a Board/Executive Committee portion
in which business was discussed and a Community Forum that covered topics of
interest to the general membership.
• Justice University Trademark.
With the completion of the two seminars introducing the fundamentals of
the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism, all requirements have been met for
trademarking the name “Justice University.”
The next step is to present more seminars to larger student groups to
expand the outreach. A suggestion was
made that a seminar might be given on just basic definitions and terms so that participants
can be prepared for the special language of the Just Third Way.
• Dignity, Freedom, and Power. The final editing of Freedom,
Dignity, and Power, the short book on the Just Third Way of Economic
Personalism, is in its final stages. Unless
there are no further delays, the book may be formatted and available for
distribution by January.
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| Lay some heavy bread on us, man. |
• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making
your purchases through the Amazon Smile
program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your Amazon account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift through. Once you’ve typed (or copied and pasted) “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you will be taken to
the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 28 different
countries and 34 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, India, Canada,
Spain, and the United Kingdom. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “The
Characteristics of Social Justice,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “Pillars
of a Just Market Economy,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 47,” and “Why
Keynesianism Promotes Waste and Consumerism.”
Those are the happenings for this
week, at least those that we know about.
If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a
note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into
the next “issue.” Due to imprudent
language on the part of some commentators, we removed temptation and disabled
comments.
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