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Niall Ferguson – Metaphor Hacker
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Education Extended writing Knowledge Language Linguistics

Pseudo-education as a weapon: Beyond the ridiculous in linguistic prescriptivism

Most of us are all too happy to repeat clichés about education to motivate ourselves and others to engage in this liminal ritual of mass socialization. One such phrase is “knowledge is power”. It is used to refer not just to education, of course, but to all sorts of intelligence gathering from business to politics. […]

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Extended writing History Metaphor

Killer App is a bad metaphor for historical trends, good for pseudoteaching

Niall Ferguson wrote in The Guardian some time ago about how awful history education has become with these “new-fangled” 40-year-old methods like focusing on “history skills” that leads to kids leaving school knowing “unconnected fragments of Western history: Henry VIII and Hitler, with a small dose of Martin Luther King, Jr.” but not who was […]