Does the West still want its young people to succeed?
You've said that the our society laboured for thousands of years to create universities and carve out respectable identities for young people so that they can learn to read, learn to speak and learn to write because it will make them an individual superpower. You said that everyone is praying that students will come to universities so that can manifest everything they can manifest. You said that you don't understand why the universities have forgotten that. My question is: did universities simple forget that articulated speech makes their student powerful - or does the West no longer care about raising powerful young people at the end of history? Or maybe worse still, do you think that efforts to shed the patriarchy have resulted in the West becoming an oedipal mother who does not want her children to succeed? How can a young person thrive within institutions and societies acting like an indifferent or oedipal mother?
Contientiousness, anxiety, and introverted-ness
Everything was always done for me when I was a kid. People introduced me to others and I was never expected to talk or entertain, and I never learned the skills. If I was more conscientious, I would be way more skilled and competent by now. My development in skills was constantly interfered with as a kid. The anxiety that I feel about messing up, or making a mistake is so bad that it consumes all my energy and quickly, so that I don’t have any energy left to socialize or to do a good job at whatever I am doing. Am I really an introvert? Or is my social and performance anxiety so terrible that as a coping mechanism I don’t participate to save the energy and effort? Is there really such a thing as an introvert in that regard?
S.W.E.A.T. Pledge and Mike Rowe
Have you heard of this? The Pledge is tied to the trade school scholarships his foundation gives away. I would like to hear your thoughts on a quest that Mr. Rowe himself refers to as a Sisyphean endeavor. The true and honest interest in this however is to plant the seed of the idea of a conversation between the two of you. I believe this would be beneficial to both of your causes as you both seem to want to build a better future by building better people.
Reading Great Books
How do you develop reading as a skill? More particularly, if you want to read and effectively comprehend difficult texts, like many of the books on your reading list, how would you recommend someone approaches that? How do you reach a point where you can converse fluently in the ideas you have read about?