It goes without saying. They wouldn't pass a grade six exam on essay writing because they are so filled with profound contradictions. In fact, the attitudes toward training that neo-conservatives are putting forward are not simply attacks on thinking, they're a refusal of the idea of globalization. If you spend a lot of time training kids on machines, you know perfectly well that by the time they get out of school, the machines are going to be obsolete. In the meantime, they haven't learned how to dance on one foot and think of six things at once, which is what they'll need to do in an unstable, changing world economy, where they're going to have to move their career five or six times in different directions.
Philosophy is far more useful than turning a machine off and on.
We're just fine here. It doesn't work. I think you can see that when Canada works, it's a continuation of the idea of interested parties in communities, reaching out of their communities on the basis of a social contract. The problem of living next to Rome is the problem that you're living next to Rome, next to a centre of imperial power. This country was put together from the beginning in a way that was unlike the classic western nation-state.