Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Philistine and genius
    Philistine and genius
    Philistine and genius
    Ebook69 pages1 hour

    Philistine and genius

    By Boris Sidis

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Philistine And Genius is a book by Boris Sidis. It presents a spiteful critique of the American educational system, while providing methods that lead to improved desire and thirst for knowledge in children.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGood Press
    Release dateDec 8, 2020
    ISBN4064066061128
    Philistine and genius

    Read more from Boris Sidis

    Related to Philistine and genius

    Related ebooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Memoirs Of A Microaggressor

      Nov 26, 2020

      TO UNDERSTAND OUr current moment, start with public apologies. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, surely thought he was on safe ground when he came out in favour of delaying a Philip Guston exhibition because it included depictions of t

      5 min read

    • Article

      Lest Darkness Fall

      Oct 16, 2023

      Lest Darkness Fall
      5 min read

    • Article

      Europe and Its Enemies

      Nov 17, 2019

      Europe and Its Enemies
      11 min read

    • Article

      Michael Wood On...

      Jan 21, 2021

      I’m reading Camilla Townsend’s Fifth Sun, which won the 2020 Cundill Prize, the biggest literary prize anywhere for history. A boldly imaginative attempt to tell the story of the Aztecs from indigenous sources, it raises fascinating issues. The Spani

      3 min read

    • Article

      How Horror Changed After WWI

      Oct 31, 2018

      How Horror Changed After WWI
      7 min read

    • Article

      Silence, Propaganda Reign As West Stokes Fears Of 'Looming Threat' Of War With China

      May 5, 2023

      In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on "the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists" to discuss the "rapid crumbling of c

      6 min read

    • Article

      Robert C. Koehler: Civilizing the savage

      Jul 22, 2021

      We crossed the Atlantic, encountered a bunch of savages, defeated them, claimed the continent. We won! This is the history I remember learning, as satisfying and stupid as a John Wayne movie. The myth is crumbling and cracking, its certainty now as p

      3 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Apr 10, 2023

      by Sian Norris (Verso, ISBN 9781839764738) versobooks.com You’d be forgiven for thinking that today’s attack on abortion rights is rooted in theological beliefs about when human life begins. Sian Norris, in this timely and chillingly relevant investi

      4 min read

    • Article

      Errant Thought

      Mar 1, 2023

      If brown rats spoke a human language, they would coin the term rodentism to affirm their conviction that the world is their trash can. Homo sapiens, however, is convinced, with Protagoras, that “Man is the measure of all things,” and so we invented h

      4 min read

    • Article

      How To Survive The Blitz

      Mar 29, 2020

      How To Survive The Blitz
      8 min read

    • Article

      On War and Literature

      Jun 8, 2022

      War literature, at its best, exists not as scripture but as liturgy, not to explain but to remember. The post On War and Literature appeared first on The Millions.

      19 min read

    • Article

      Global Conflicts Affect All Humanity

      Nov 1, 2023

      THE Greek saying, “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad”, is perhaps most applicable in the case of the Middle Eastern conflict. As Israel and Hamas lock horns in Gaza, a tessellated state of a once-proud Palestine, they are causing ha

      3 min read

    • Article

      False Nostalgia

      Nov 19, 2021

      False Nostalgia
      12 min read

    • Article

      Send In The Spivs

      Apr 1, 2022

      IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW catastrophic, how terrible, how morally squalid, how globally imperilling the circumstances, there is nothing that cannot be shamelessly exploited by the descendants of Stanley Baldwin’s “hard-faced men who look as if they had d

      3 min read

    • Article

      Slouching Towards Fiction

      Feb 6, 2022

      Slouching Towards Fiction
      2 min read

    • Article

      History

      Apr 3, 2024

      Viking, 464pp, £20 In this follow-up to his 2021 bestseller Empireland, wrote Andrew Marr in the Times, Sanghera ‘tries to understand why the modern British display such amnesia about their forebears’ vast, world-changing project.’ Although the book

      11 min read

    • Article

      A Guarantor Of Liberalism

      Aug 9, 2019

      An unfortunate trope among the global liberal elite is the demonisation of patriotism. Often, extremist nationalist groups of the 20th century, such as the Nazis, or the Italian Fascists, are used as examples to try and make us wary of patriotism and

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Leap Into The Unknown

      Jan 25, 2023

      A Leap Into The Unknown
      5 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Nov 28, 2019

      Reviews
      8 min read

    • Article

      Remember Mao's Famine, Forget Churchill's Racism: How The West Colonised Asian Minds

      Aug 22, 2021

      In late June and early July, First Nations communities in Canada found over 1,000 unmarked graves of children in Indian residential schools, which were run by the Roman Catholic Church from 1899 to 1997. This has led to activists burning Catholic chu

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Philistine and genius

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Philistine and genius - Boris Sidis

      Boris Sidis

      Philistine and genius

      Published by Good Press, 2022

      goodpress@okpublishing.info

      EAN 4064066061128

      Table of Contents

      PREFACE

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      VII

      VIII

      IX

      X

      XI

      XII

      XIII

      XIV

      XV

      XVI

      XVII

      XVIII

      APPENDIX: PRECOCITY IN CHILDREN

      PREFACE

      Table of Contents

      WHEN in 1909 Philistine and Genius was delivered by me in the form of a Commencement address before the Harvard Summer School, my prediction of the coming European war storm was regarded by everybody as dream and fancy. My best friends and sympathisers thought my foreboding unjustified and ill-founded. I was an alarmist, a Cassandra, when I spoke of the coming catastrophe which was to shake Europe to its very foundation. When Philistine and Genius was published in 1911 the American and European press, dealing with the views advanced in this little volume, completely ignored the following warning given by me:

      "About the middle of the nineteenth century Buckle made the prediction that no war was any more to occur among civilized nations. Henceforth peace was to reign supreme. 'The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; their young ones shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. . . . Nations shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not lift up swords against nations, nor shall they learn war any more.' This prophecy was rather hasty. We have had since the Civil war, the Franco-Prussian war, the Spanish-American war, the Boer war, the Russo-Japanese war, not counting the ceaseless wars of extermination carried on by civilized nations among the various semi-civilized and primitive tribes. Civilized nations do not as yet beat their swords into ploughshares, but keep on increasing the strength of their 'armed peace,' and are ready to fight bloody battles in the quest of new lands and the conquest of new markets.

      In spite of the Hague conference, convoked by the peace-loving Czar, no other age has had such large standing armies provided with such costly and efficient weapons of execution ready for instant use. The red spectre still stalks abroad claiming its victims. We still believe in the baptism of fire and redemption by blood. The dogma of blood redemption is still at the basis of our faith, and, consciously or unconsciously, we brand that sacred creed on the minds of the young generation.

      The present European upheaval has finally disclosed to the impartial observer the fearful state of Europe as the final outcome of its armed peace. Instead of realizing the dangers of armed peace or of preparedness, we are ready to become a military democracy in which every able-bodied man is a soldier or a sailor, every child is a scout, and every woman a nurse or a munition worker. We are anxious to waste our resources on preparedness rather than on the education of the young. We hanker for the greatest navy in the world at a cost of several billions of dollars. We aspire after a million headed, billion armed navy and army. We clamor for universal, compulsory, military service in which our children should be drilled for murder and slaughter at the decree of a few autocratic officials and officers. We imitate Europe slavishly, in spite of the fact that the policy of preparedness or of armed peace has kept Europe in a state of turmoil for generations, has brought her to the brink of ruin, and has plunged her into the most cruel and most destructive war ever waged by man.

      The recent estimate of Count von Roedern, Secretary of the Imperial German Treasury, puts the total cost of the war to date, the end of 1916, for all the belligerents, at fifty-nine and a half billions of dollars. The Mechanics and Metals National Bank of New York City figures that seventy-five billion dollars will be spent for direct military purposes, if the war lasts another year. The enormity of that expenditure can only be realized if we consider that the total wealth of Great Britain and Ireland is eighty-five billions of dollars, that of Germany eighty billions, that of France fifty billions, that of Russia forty billions, that of Austria-Hungary twenty-five billions, and that of Italy twenty billions. Such waste is appalling.

      According to the figures given by Mr. Frank H. Simonds, eighteen and a half million casualties, of which deaths make up nearly one-quarter, is the toll already levied on the fighting men of all the belligerent nations by twenty-six months of war. More than any other war the present European struggle squanders the wealth of empires and sacrifices the lives of nations.

      Our social status is a reversion to savagery of the most degenerate type, an atavistic lapse towards the paleolithic and neolithic man, only more brutal, on account of the greater power for evil possessed by modern man. What Hun or Vandal ever dreamt of such colossal destruction! The fame of Attila, Jenghiz Khan, Batu, and Tamerlane pales and fades before the glory of' the Kaiser. In a couple of years the aggressive German Kultur has caused more ruin to humanity than all the invasions of the yellow peril in the history of mankind. Can we take issue

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1