Sowell’s mission: Enable students to get an education despite being in college

“What is crucial, for young people especially, is to develop and exercise the ability to confront opposing beliefs and put those beliefs to tests of facts and logic” Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell has launched a milestone website that “will enable students to get an education despite being in college” – a hub of information thoughtfully curated by the maverick genius himself.

Sowell has always considered education to be the single most impactful way to improve people’s lives. Again and again he has argued that real knowledge and facts are the most powerful tool you can equip young people with – a solid preparation for the challenges of real life. He warned of social activism’s invasion of the classroom – the critical point where the quest for real knowledge was compromised for the sake of ideology.

Indeed, it is with deep appreciation and gratitude that the celebrated economist recalls his own 1940s Harlem teachers who insisted on correct spelling and error-free arithmetic. It was this knowledge-focused education that prepared him and his fellow students for real life, and secured Sowell Harvard, Chicago and Columbia degrees. Today’s progressive education, he argues, fails to pass real knowledge on to students, robbing them of the ability to test opposing beliefs with facts and logic.

 In many of our most prestigious educational institutions,
you can go literally from kindergarten to the Ph.D., without
ever encountering an argument that differs fundamentally
from whatever beliefs are being indoctrinated in these
institutions. Such indoctrination has long been common in
totalitarian dictatorships. But, in recent times, it has also
become increasingly widespread in American educational,
corporate and other institutions

Facts and Rhetoric

Thomas Sowell’s unparalleled scholarship has been shaping the western cultural discourse for over six decades and counting. Author of dozens of bestselling classics, he holds a rare intellectual prowess that is admired by luminaries and commentators the world over. Time and time again, the maverick thinker swam bravely against the mainstream tide, determined to spread facts that in many cases, were completely hidden from students, academics and the cultural discourse at large.

As such, Facts Against Rhetoric embodies Sowell’s life-long mission to empower people with real knowledge – it is the noted empiricist’s fact-based contra to an education system plagued by hollow rhetoric. 

The extensive website lists 26 key ’subjects and issues’ that are at the heart of western politics, society and culture. Issues such as ability, affirmative action, cultural controversies, economic issues, education, family, black Americans, government, intellectuals and ideologies, sexual issues, war and peace, racial and ethnic conflicts, Jews around the world and many more.

Under each topic is an extensive list of resources from a great number of noted observers, researchers, journalists and commentators, including Sowell’s own classics. Hundreds of books, articles and online interviews, presenting both ends of the argument on the given topic, including that of his opposers. The result is a golden opportunity to  understand not just of the topic itself, but the multitude of aspects impacting our perception of it, and even its evolution over the years. 

Imagine the game changing difference to the cultural and political arenas if people had a better grasp on inflation, the free market, immigration, ability or the history of the Jewish people – “if educators developed in students the ability to look at two different views and only then try to figure out which of them is correct.”

Imagine the difference that it would make if we knew the meaning of often used terms such as minimum wage, equity, equality or poverty, imagine grasping the pivotal importance of culture, or knowing  the real history of certain peoples and groups, rather than accepting  mainstream media’s take. Sowell’s writing and videos of the real history of slavery is a prime example of this, proving to be a game-changer for countless of individuals worldwide, most notably to black Americans who are shocked to learn fundamental truths that were hidden from them by education and mainstream media. Dumbfounded by Sowell’s truth, many openly ask ‘why did they not teach us this at school?”

 The purpose of this website is to enable people who want
to think for themselves to readily find many sources of
information and analysis on many subjects— whether in the
form of brief commentaries or hour-long interviews of
knowledgeable people in electronic media

Follow the facts wherever they may lead

It is Sowell’s belief that only when we fully grasp the meaning of the terms we use, can we begin to see what it is that we agree and disagree on. Perhaps more importantly, that we need to understand where the other side is coming from – what our opposers’ beliefs are and what their line of reasoning is.And so, under Biographies we find Winston Churchill as well as Bill Gates, Adolf Hitler and Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx and Ronald Reagan, Obama and Thatcher. Another example is Economy where AOC argues that capitalists exploit the workers, while free market advocate, Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman addresses the question “is capitalism humane?”

Under Slavery we learn of blacks’ hidden century of growth that “receives almost no notice in the academic literature”. A historic century where black poverty rate declined from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960, prior to the great expansion of the welfare state – “by 1940, blacks had not only begun to achieve education, they had begun to move into certain trades”.

We learn of the real history of slavery and the wrongly accepted perception of it being a race issue. Slavery goes back to the beginning of time argues Sowell, and continues to this very day – it was prompted not by racism but by the exploitation of vulnerable, disadvantaged people. Sowell has posted much of his insight online shocking countless Black Americans who were staggered to learn the real history of slavery. His fact based insight has led many  to question the integrity and validity of the education system that deprived them of this knowledge.

The Jews

It is impossible to note the tens of books and online interviews listed under each subject – all deserve a mention. The resources and authors below are noted to give an idea of the vast breadth of views, authors and commentators featured.

The Jews category teaches of Jews history and the many countries they have settled in. We hear of the Jews in Islamic states, Jews in the Roman world, in Harlem, Russia and more. Through these, a pattern emerges of Jewish culture through the ages, from ancient times to the present day -a culture of learning and literacy that at times, granted Jews an advantage over the largely illiterate population, Jews flourishing wherever they settle, being resented as the middleman minority, and surviving in the face of persecution.

Resources here include A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made by Irving Howe, The People of the Book by Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Jews of Islam by Bernard Lewis, Martin Gilbert’s Churchill and the Jews as well as The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History by Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, How Antiracism Becomes Antisemitism by Barton Swaim, and many more.

Affirmative Action, Culture, Sexual Issues

We learn of the record of Affirmative Action in America and other countries, within academia and other institutions. Resources here include Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It by Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr, Sowell’s Affirmative Action Reconsidered: Was It Necessary in Academia? And When Race Trumps Merit by Heather Mac Donald.

Geography matters

Geographic Influences is a particularly important subject, looking at the reasons for differences in income and wealth between nations, as well as differences among groups within nations.

Read Sowell’s and his fellow luminaries’ words, and see your view of poverty, wealth, equality, the free market, history and even welfare, enriched and even transformed. Understanding what factors contribute to economic differences is a game changer, as is comprehending why a particular combinations of factors breeds prosperity but another leads to degradation.Resources such as People in the Mountains by James S. Gardner, Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions by Martin F. Price, The Physical Geography of Africa by William M. Adams, The Geography of the Mediterranean Region: Its Relation to Ancient History by Ellen Churchill Semple and many more