Quote of the Day
My education, I thought, had failed to create [feelings of human sympathy] in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis, while the whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything else.
Alec Nevala-Lee 
This is a provocative quote – especially coming from an influential philosopher that (is said to) promote individual prerogatives vs. the collective (“the general good”) in general and the State in particular.
Expanding the focus beyond Mill himself, my reaction is that moral impulses include the both the selfish and the sympathetic – without regard to education; that analysis is indeed learned and the purview of education (the right kind, that is); that regarding morals/ethics, parents are/should be more crucial than education; and that American education over-emphasizes collective considerations.
When Mill came up, education was mostly private – unlike the American experiment starting ca. 1900, where the State imposed an effective monopoly on education.
Jim Susky
December 11, 2018 at 11:33 am
Kindergarten was the best year of our lives.
Tell us about your education Jim. I will reveal mine as we go. Have you read any of Alec’s fiction. He is elite. I follow him.
I copy Dolly. What would Mills make of her first blush; wild berries cuz her Dado would not let her have make up.
Ben Turpin
December 11, 2018 at 10:08 pm