I was recently declared persona non grata by my alumni chat group. Because – so proclaimed the Site Admin, herself not even a graduate of our alma mater – I dared post comments with “more than one thot.”
Okay. As a slight concession, then, I have broken this longish (20 min) “thot-laden” video into five easy subsections. I don’t normally encourage or cater to viewers on YouTube or my blog sites but for those who like to be forewarned, here is a succinct topical overview.
1. MID-LIFE CAREER CHANGE (& Nightly Obsessions) 0:00-3:32
Switching to a new career in my 40s was a colossal mistake. The Humanities are dead, my 34 years of teaching all for naught.
2. CRITICAL THINKING (& The Post-Truth Era) 3:32-6:35
We live in an era when facts don’t matter. Critical thinking skills are taught in the humanities but in a post-truth world they have become irrelevant. Not only do humans tend to make emotional decisions not based on reason and evidence, but why bother to try and reason someone out of an opinion they didn’t reason themselves into?
3. WORKFORCE EDUCATION (& The Irrelevance of the Humanities) 6:35-12:28
Humanities are perceived as not being job-related. They do in fact teach marketable skills but educators have been remiss in stressing vocational benefits.
4. CULTURAL CHANGE (& The Crisis of Humanity) 12:28-16:07
The decline of the humanities is symptomatic of a larger cultural paradigm change that is redefining what it means to be human: (a) materialistic culture elevates economic consideration to the supreme good, (b) contemporary society promotes the individual over the collective, and (c) both religious anti-rationalism and populist anti-elitism foster resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind, and a tendency to denigrate those (intellectuals) who engage in it.
5. MAGA’s BETRAYAL (& A Life Wasted) 16:07-19:59
Over & beyond teaching useful skills that transcend the classroom, a study of the humanities leads to an awakened understanding of oneself as a member of the human species, including the capacity to empathize and inhabit the experience of others. Nowhere are these concerns to be found in Project 2025, MAGA’s blueprint for the future of America, except lumped derogatorily under the pejorative, “woke.”
NOTE: this is not your typical dry lecture but contains a constant stream of supplemental video clips to match and enhance each “thot.”Even my one-year-old puppy has his moments.
giblets & flapdoodle 
Praise be to her who banned you from the chat group and caused you to create this wonderful video. Jim N.
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Hi John, I watched your video and couldn’t agree more, except for your thinking that you’ve wasted your life teaching. You might not have reached every student, but I feel certain you had a major impact on many of them. And that’s not wasted time! I tell people I’m “old school” when it comes to education. I don’t think it should be job training either, unless you’re going to be an electrician, etc. Learn to analyze problems, compare solutions, and I think you can be trained for almost any job. I definitely wasn’t a great student at FPC, but I did learn the importance of the humanities. It’s depressing, though, to see the liberal arts lose importance and funding, while everyone concentrates on STEM. I can only imagine what Tony would say about today’s higher education thinking. Also, and rather surprising to me, are you saying that the FPC alum admin, Janie Wright, rejected your post? I can’t imagine why, especially since we are inundated with everything Kathy Dennis posts! (I think she mostly just copies and pastes articles she finds interesting.) If so, I’m going to write her and protest her decision. And apropos of nothing above, I’m going to look at two beautiful greyhounds on Sat. I’ll let you know. 😊 Joy
“Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.” Dr. Seuss
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No, she didn’t “reject” my post, just snidely remarked that it contained too many “thots.” I took that as a compliment, actually. And as a segue into this video which contains a whole bunch of thots. The “wasted life” part is just my way of framing a whole slew of ideas about the decline of the humanities and all the cultural changes we are witnessing. And yes, teaching for me was always a self-actualizing experience that totally enriched my life – as I bet it was for Tony too. Two more greyhounds! Please send pictures when you bring them home.
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