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I love reading these … brings ideas and historical facts into my awareness. And reality.

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Really insightful connection. What I take away is not necessarily an overall "overvaluing" of "education," but a narrow and rigid sense of what one should be "educated" about.

It's interesting to think of today when, at once, our society 1) discards "education" in domains that don't happen inside a college, and 2) within the same colleges, has begun to undervalue the importance of education in that same very humanities/spiritual/philosophical domain that your cases seemed to have been over-fixated on.

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What a curious and compelling piece, Russell. "An academic and erudite withdrawal from the truth of the world," you write. To me, this resonates as an ominous allegory for our current malaise in the West.

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Nice connection, Russell!

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