Month: September 2004

After I read the letter Edward linked to below, I googled Professor Kozloff, and found his web page, with a link to this letter on it. I also read some of his other papers, and discovered that when he describes the version of education he seems to prefer, he repeatedly invokes philosophers to justify it. (He has the fascinating idea of basing an educational philosophy on Plato, Aristotle, and C.S. Peirce, who, last I checked, didn’t have a whole lot in common.) The philosopher he mentioned most often, in the works I read, was Plato, and in particular Plato’s myth of the cave. Thus he writes: “The classical role of teacher is to educate students—from the Latin word educare, to lead forth—out of the cave of ignorance and false belief and into the open air where students, using observation and reasoning strategies (inductive and deductive logic) can come to know how things are.  (See Plato, Republic, 29, 514a-521b.)”

I would ordinarily assume, out of courtesy, that Professor Kozloff is not just using Plato ornamentally — dressing up his pages with him, as though he were a sort of tony festoon — but that he has actually read the Republic. But I can’t, since the letter he has posted is so flatly at odds with Plato generally, and with the myth of the cave in particular, that no one who had actually read and tried to understand Plato, and who agreed with him enough to cite him approvingly, could possibly have written it.

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There’s a reprinted “Letter to Our Enemies” on the blog called Horsefeathers. I’ve only just discovered this blog and so don’t have a good sense of its reputation, but it looks like a LGF sort of place. The author of the letter is Martin Kozloff, Professor of Education at The University of North Carolina at Wilmington (or so Horsefeathers indicates).

Normally I would ignore this sort of thing, but this one is truly out there, or I would respond at the source, but I’m not at all certain I could control what I end up writing there—occassionally I’m a bit of a hot head—so I’m posting my response here, where I have some control over what gets written.

Here’s an excerpt from Professor Kozloff’s letter to a somewhat ill-defined group of Arab-Muslims (one has to assume all of them):

One day soon, our planes and missiles will begin turning your mosques, your madrasses, your hotels, your government offices, your hideouts, and your neighborhoods into rubble.

And then our soldiers will enter your cities and begin the work of killing you, roaches, as you crawl from the debris.

As cowards, you will have your hands in the air and you will get on your knees begging for mercy. And we will instead give you justice. Your actions and your words long ago placed you far from any considerations of mercy. You are not men.

And if you come to this country and harm a child, shoot a mother, hijack a bus, or bomb a mall, we will do what we did in 1775. Millions of us will form militias.

We will burn your mosques.

We will invade the offices of pro-arab-muslim organizations, destroy them, and drag their officers outside.

We will tell the chancellors of universities either to muzzle or remove anti American professors, whose hatred for their own country we have tolerated only because we place a higher value on freedom of speech. But we will no longer tolerate treason. We will muzzle and remove them.

We will transport arab-muslims to our deserts, where they can pray to scorpions under the blazing sun.

Congratulations Professor Kozloff. I am now officially and sincerely more afraid of you than I am the terrorists.

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