Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 91. Sunrise is 5:28 and sunset is 8:32 for 15 hours 4 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1977, during a period of financial and social turmoil, New York City experiences an electrical blackout lasting nearly 24 hours that leads to widespread fires and looting.
These are difficult economic and social times, and understandably parents worry for their children’s prospects. And yet, and yet, there should be time in college life for curiosity:
On one side, universities are under enormous pressure to become engines of employment.
A study of nearly a million students this spring ranked liberal-arts graduates among the lowest financial returns of any field. On June 29 the Department of Education finalized rules that will strip federal loans from programs whose graduates do not out-earn high school diploma holders. In addition, this month the Department of Education launched Workforce Pell, extending the nation’s largest college aid program to job training courses as short as eight weeks.
On the other side stand traditionalists, exemplified by the retired Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, who recently defined the university as a community devoted to the cultivation of the mind. They see all of this as the surrender of education to employment.
[…]
Here is the mistake: concluding that if job outcomes are the goal, then job training is the method.
The capacity that actually carries a person upward over a forty-year career — through layoffs, through industry upheavals, and now through AI — is not any particular skill. It is curiosity, which is the drive to close the gap between what you know and what you want to know. And curiosity is developed precisely by the parts of education that look least vocational.
[…]
Minds grow the way muscles do: by being challenged. Environments that withhold the answer long enough for the question to deepen produce curious people. Environments built for the fastest path to a credential produce fewer — not because skills training is bad, but because it is designed to eliminate exactly the struggle in which curiosity forms.
This is why, as politically tone-deaf as it sounds, we still need to teach Chaucer and Tocqueville. The humanities put a particular kind of question at the center: questions with no single right answer. What does this passage mean? What holds a democracy together? Working on such questions is not soft; it is rigor of a harder kind, marshaling logic and evidence when no experiment will ever settle the matter.
See Ryan Martin and Sachin Shivaram, Wisconsin colleges should cultivate curiosity | Opinion, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 13, 2026.
Well said.
There’s no question that this libertarian blogger leans, as Martin and Shivaram express it, on one side of this divide: my paternal family, my spouse, and our children all share the conviction that education is fundamentally about curiosity and investigation. This is our way.
In this, it’s possible — I’d say easily so — to share a view of “a community devoted to the cultivation of the mind, both the theoretical mind that raises one’s sights and the practical mind that makes one mindful of necessities” without Mansfield’s socially repugnant politics. (Mansfield’s sad irony: a commitment to the cultivation of the mind yet accompanied by an inveterate narrowness of mind toward minorities.)
One of the aspects of educational discussions in Whitewater is that most supporters and most critics of education have singular positions: either all educational decisions are right (regardless of cost) or all educational decisions are wrong (because of cost).
Expenses, budgets, marketing, branding, communication — underneath all of these merely instrumental or procedural means lie substantive, enduring principles of learning.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Field Campaign in the Arctic: Measuring Sea Ice From Air and Space: