Pax on both houses: High School Students Using "Study Drugs"

Sunday, June 10, 2012

High School Students Using "Study Drugs"

William James

http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/james.html

Greetings,

We read the following New York Times article and say "Not my kids!" http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/education/seeking-academic-edge-teenagers-abuse-stimulants.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120610

But let's assume that 20 years from now, "study drugs" have become widely normalized and kids using these drugs are getting "all" the places at "good" schools.

What do high-performing, productivity-oriented parents do then?

The great William James -- whose Godfather was Ralph Waldo Emerson, and whose students included Teddy Roosevelt, George Santayana, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Lippman and Gertrude Stein -- made this startling comment: "The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word "success" - is our national disease." William James /// http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_james

James' "Varieties of Religious Experience" is widely regarded as the most seminal American book about the nature-and-value of religion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience

Jimmy Carter's Moral Equivalent of War Speech, on April 17, 1977, equating the United States' 1970's energy crisis, oil crisis and the changes and sacrifices Carter's proposed plans would require with the "moral equivalent of war," may have borrowed its title, much of its theme and the memorable phrase from James' classic essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" derived from his last speech, delivered at Stanford University in 1906, in which "James considered one of the classic problems of politics: how to sustain political unity and civic virtue in the absence of war or a credible threat...."

Pax

Alan

PS If you think we'd never normalize "Study Drugs," consider the many "well-educated" parents -- some of whom we know -- who insist on antibiotics for their child's cold or flu. If their physician won't prescribe them, they doctor-shop. Hey. What's a little carefully-administered pharmaceutical meth? Faster. Bigger. Stronger. Bed. The All-American prescription for winning battles while losing the war.