16 Replies to “Wishing Jordan Peterson a Successful Retirement”

  5. Is it possible Jordon Peterson is joining the Weinsteins, Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss et al, in their effort to launch a heterodox university, University of Austin, in Texas.

  8. Not just the universities, the entire education system is rotten to the core. My wife retired from the Peel Board as a high school VP in 2011 and figured it wasn’t a minute too soon. My son’s mother-in-law retired from the same Board in December as an elementary school principal. Last week my wife heard from a former colleague who has retired in his mid fifties. All the good teachers are getting out as soon as they can, so you can imagine what they are leaving behind.

    It is going to take decades to undo the damage, assuming there is some form of will to regain some degree of sanity.

    1. Its absolutely obvious that quality of education has been dropping for a long time, probably since the end of WWII. Take a look at a high school math book from the 1950s vs. a modern one. In the 1950s they covered more material, had clearer explanations, and had more difficult exercises than they do today.

      1. Woe betide anyone who tries to use some of those older materials or standards nowadays. I found out about that at Armpit College.

        Firstly, the kiddies mewled and puked. After all, they never had to work that hard in high school, so why start at the post-secondary level? Then the administrators mewled and puked because the kiddies were mewling and puking. Oh, I got a lot of sympathy from them, but I was also reminded that the days when those standards were enforced were long gone.

        The administrators didn’t want any hassle. The general attitude was, to mis-quote Harry Truman, “If you can’t stand the heat, switch off the stove and bring in air conditioning.”

  9. I hope Dr. Peterson will soon be called out of retirement to chair a committee on fundamental reform of North American schools, colleges and universities.

    My own suggestions:

    1. Make all faculty and staff at schools and universities receiving government support re-apply for their jobs. The diversity hires, regardless of field, and the diversity officers may consider their careers in academia over.

    2a. As compensation for historical discrimination against Jews by North American universities, offer international students who have served honourably in the Israel Defense Forces in the last ten years a full fee waiver for four years of undergraduate study at the North American university of their choice.

    2b. Make room for them by denying admission to international students whose governments refuse to recognize the State of Israel.

  10. Society has still not come to grips with the fact technology has rendered the need for both public schools and universities, as currently constructed, superfluous. Since neither are no longer necessary for their ostensible function, they don’t perform them, and hence are purposeless. Both institutions will need fundamental transformations to survive.

    The public school’s stated purpose was to teach the “3 R’s”; today, it does a passable job at the elementary level and gets progressively worse as students age. The university’s stated purpose was to encourage thought and creativity; today, it fosters a monoculture of thought that represses creativity. But those stated purposes were, as always, based on the unsensed technology background that drove their real purpose.

    For the real purpose of the public school, which sprang up independently in the countries of the Western world shortly after the Industrial Revolution, was designed to train children *to work in factories*. Thus, these children – who before, had gotten up with the sun and cows and chickens, and ate when the food was ready, and slept when chores were done – learned to assemble at a bell, sit down at a bell, get up at a bell, eat lunch at a bell, go home at a bell. This is of course exactly the obedience demanded of these children when they were sent to work in the factories at 10 or 11 or younger.

    The university, whose Latin root means to ‘turn one into the whole’, was the classic case of bringing the people to the bits. The knowledge, in the form of scrolls, texts, and manuscripts, was hard to move, hard to read, and fragile. Copying books, prior to the Gutenberg press of 1450, was slow, expensive, and laborious. If one wanted to disseminate knowledge, the people were considerably more mobile than the books. Of course it made sense to gather the best minds together so they could share ancient data and current ideas, and perhaps create new ones (as they often did, cf Copernicus and Galileo).

    Electronic technology has upset the ground upon which both these figures rested. We don’t need that many factory workers any more, and the ones we need will be supplied by Cambodia and Bangladesh. The bits move much more quickly than the people these days, and my smartphone gives me access to virtually all the world’s knowledge, so there’s no need to gather the learned together for them to share ideas. Shorn of their purpose, both institutions have transmogrified into settling ponds for the worst of humanity’s ideas.

    Peterson knows this at a gut level. I’m sure he will be working on University 2.0 somewhere.

    1. I agree re universities, and to some extent high schools, but younger kids still need school. Some of it is socializing and learning to get along with other people. Maybe a reconfiguration of some sort.

  11. Jordan Peterson is not retiring.
    He is congenitally UNABLE to retire.
    Perhaps people are looking at his forfeiture of tenure and the apparently prestigious honorific emiritus title as retirement.

    I like and respect him enormously but you have to admit that he has a bit of a messiah complex. Messiahs don’t retire. I’m getting a bit of a kick out of all those new portenous, grizzled great man portraits on YouTube.

    “Take down the universities”. I rest my case.

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