Education: Stop feeding the kids garbage

People like Maimonides, Aristotle, Plato, and Allan Bloom concentrated a lot on education. That is a major theme in The Republic and also in The Closing of the American Mind. The natural thing to restore Western Civilization then would be to look at education.
Stop feeding the kids garbage would be the first step.

The next step would be to take the advice of the Rambam to learn Physics and Metaphysics. That is to restructure education completely by throwing out the worthless subjects and putting in things of value. 

Everything called science nowadays outside of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology is just pseudo science. Allan Bloom was critical of the Humanities and Social Studies departments in universities but still I would have to say they do good work in terms of Music and the Arts.

[Metaphysics in the terminology of the Rambam clearly includes Aristotle's book The Metaphysics. But I think one would have to include also Plato, Kant and Hegel.] 

Torah as a cure

The Sages of the Gemara in Bava Batra bring down that Job said  that God created righteous people and evil people. Therefore what can man say to Him? He does what he likes. [That is the problem of Theodicity. The problem with evil. That is there are evil people and they do get punished for their sins even though it seems they had no choice but to be evil as they were created.]

His friends answered ברא יצר הרע ברא לו תורה תבלין God created the evil inclination but he also created the Torah as a cure. So there still is free will. One can choose to learn and thus be saved from the evil inclination.

To the Rambam this would have to include learning Physics and Metaphysics as he includes both in the category of th Oral Law in the Mishne Torah. [And he expands on this in the Guide.]
Obviously other rishonim like the Ramban and the Rashba disagree with the Rambam on this point  but to me it seems the Rambam was correct. Not that I am in any position to decide between giants like the Rishonim but rather I had to decide for myself what approach to take.

So Torah as a cure would include the Written Law, the Oral Law, Physics, and Metaphysics.
The last two clearly refer to Aristotle, but more than Aristotle. {The Rambam specifically says he is referring to there subjects as understood by the ancient Greeks.}

My humble opinion is that Physics would include String Theory and Quantum Mechanics. Metaphysics I think would include Neo Platonic approach which came after the Ancient Greeks. Also Kant an Hegel. (That is my opinion.)

The Rambam as is known has an approach towards Midrashim that they are much deeper than meets the eye. The Gra also said the secrets of the Torah are contained in the Midrashim. So here too I think there must be some deeper meaning.
One thing I did notice is that God in the end of the book of Job does not agree with the friends of Job. Rather He said they had sinned in what they said. So the fact that the sages of the Talmud bring the words of Job's friends must mean something beyond the surface meaning..  That is another reason I think the Rambam is looking at the idea of Torah from a wider perspective. That is as including Metaphysics and Physics and objective moral law.

 U-24 G Major
U-25 E flat Major

היצר רע מתלבש במצוות the Satan dresses up in mitzvot. He never approaches a person saying to do a sin. Rather he always comes saying, "Let's go do a mitzvah." But inside the mitzvah is enclosed a hidden sin that takes away all the value of the mizvah because it is  מצווה הבאה בעבירה

Reb Nachman brings this idea from a midrashic statement brought in Bava Batra. But the Gra says the same thing more or less explicitly,
[This is one of the  reasons I stay as far as possible from the Jewish religious world. But the major reason is not just the above mentioned reason, rather it is that I try to avoid the straight forward idolatry that is the essence of the religious world. You can see this point in the Nefesh HaChaim of  a disciple of the Gra where he explains that idolatry can be directed towards people as much as towards inanimate objects.]

And further I feel a lot of problems that the world faces today are a result of idolatry as you can see quite often in the Old Testament--that troubles come close on the heels of idolatry. 

[That is I think some people like my own Dad work well under pressure. But that is not me.

White society has an underlying current of the drive to excel. -But that is putting it politely. In fact it is the drive to be better than anyone else. This creates a environment in which people that can excel do so. For me however this caused me a great deal of discomfort. In any case it explains why in fact White society does come up with all the new and neat stuff.
[Euclidean geometry. Parabolic geometry. Hyperbolic geometry. Projective geometry. Differential geometry. Calculus: Limits, continuity, differentiation, integration. Physical chemistry. Organic chemistry. Biochemistry. Classical mechanics. String Theory, The indeterminacy principle. The wave equation. The Parthenon.  Air conditioning. Number theory. Romanesque architecture. Gothic architecture. Information theory. Entropy. Enthalpy. Every symphony ever written. Pierre Auguste Renoir. The twelve-tone scale. The mathematics behind it, twelfth root of two and all that. S-p hybrid bonding orbitals. The Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. The purine-pyrimidine structure of the DNA ladder. Single-sideband radio. All other radio. Dentistry. The internal-combustion engine. Turbojets. Turbofans. Doppler beam-sharpening. Penicillin. Airplanes. Surgery. The mammogram.  Polio vaccine. The integrated circuit. The computer. Football. Computational fluid dynamics. Tensors. The Constitution. Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Homer, Hesiod. Glass. Rubber. Nylon. Roads. Buildings.  Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. (OK, that’s nerve gas, and maybe we didn’t really need it.) Silicone. The automobile. Really weird stuff, like clathrates, Buckyballs, and rotaxanes. The Bible. Bug spray, public-key cryptography, and RSA. Et cetera.]
Things like this:


I found the Beit Midrash environment--in [Litvak yeshivas] much more congenial to my taste. It also had an element of the drive to excel-- but in a much more relaxed form.
And in fact, even today I noticed that I do not work well under pressure.

You might have noted in the two books on Gemara that I put links to that I bring down the Chidushei HaRambam of Rav Soloveitchik and Tosphot. But as a rule, I never was able to understand Tosphot except by a kind of learning in which I would just say the entire Tosphot from beginning to end every day for a few weeks without understanding a single word. But then at some point after a few weeks or more the whole Tosphot would become clear. But the learning to get to that point was always in this kind of relaxed way or not even thinking whether I understand it or not

[That was however not when I was learning with my learning partner David Bronson who in general took the more direct approach to Tosphot: "Stay on it until you get it."]

[That is I think some people like my own Dad worked well under pressure. But that is not me.]

World view used to be connected with the idea of a systematic philosophy. That idea was lost to the degree that people have world views that are immune to realty and employ self contradictory principles. A lot of work during the Middle Ages in philosophy was done to get to a systematic non self contradictory system. This still existed during the time of Hegel. But after that a world view could be just that --a world view unrelated to reality.

The good thing about Musar Ethics of the Middle Ages is that its structure depends on well worked out world views.

[I mean that Musar tends to depend on the books of Saadia Gaon and the Rambam in terms of world view]