Posted on 09/02/2019 9:26:02 AM PDT by bitt
Most of us who came of age in the 1970s revered the university—even as it was still reeling from 1960s protests and beginning a process that resulted in its present chaos and disrepute.
Americans of the G.I. Bill-era first enshrined the idea of upward mobility through the bachelor’s degree—the assumed gateway to career security—and the positive role of expanding colleges to grow the new suburban middle classes.
Despite student radicalism and demands for reform, professors had been trained in the postwar era by an older breed of prewar scholars and teachers. As stewards they passed on their sense of professionalism about training future scholars and teachers—and just broadly educated citizens. In classics, I remember courses from scholars like British subjects like H.D. Kitto and Michael Grant, who lectured on Sophoclean tragedies or the late Roman emperors as the common inheritance of undergraduates.
Overwhelmingly liberal and often hippish in appearance, American faculty of the early 1970s still only rarely indoctrinated students, or bullied them to mimic their own progressivism. Rather, in both the humanities and sciences, students were taught the inductive method of evaluating evidence in hopes of finding some common explanation of natural and human phenomena.
Yes, we studied “mere” facts—dates, names, grammar, syntax, and formulae—but deliberately to ground or refute theories with evidence and to illustrate and enhance argumentation. Essays bled red by old masters of English prose style, whose efforts were aimed at ensuring students could communicate effectively but also with a sense of grace.
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
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there are now millions of ‘students’ who don’t belong in college, or at least don’t belong in the mostly-useless courses they’re taking....
yes, studying some humanities, arts, classics..can be good...(can add to the appreciation of life, etc.)...but that’s NOT good if done to the exclusion of acquiring a means of earning a living doing useful things for people and society (nursing, medicine, mechanics, building trades, engineering, you name it). And yet, so many students nowadays are doing just that...wasting, in effect, four or five or six years of their lives...(while, yes, going into debt to do it....)
and yes, teaching is NOT indoctrination, at least not in the Western “liberal” tradition! These hardcore leftist commie/nazi professors (and administrators) need to be rooted out of academe ... not for their dangerous politics but for failing to teach in the first place
Another example of why VDH is slowly being handed the reins as Intellectual National Treasure from Hoover colleague Thomas Sowell
Completely agree; you hit the nail on the head. How to fix the problem is another thing.
I would say expelling the “hardcore leftist commie professors and administrators” should be #1 priority, but what a Catch 22—how are you going to expel the professors when you have liberal commie “administrators,” plus a majority of tenured liberal professors?
I don’t know enough about it, but it seems to me that donators to the schools, if there are any who aren’t commies, ought to speak out and withdraw their financial support and say why.
Maybe someone with first-hand knowledge on the university circuit can offer some constructive input. I’m baffled at the tendency in state-run universities—how to correct the lunacy—and evil lunacy at that.
This man, Victor Davis Hanson ...... I wish he lived right down the road so we could shoot the breeze from time to time.
He is a gem of a man.
And yet, so many students nowadays are doing just that...wasting, in effect, four or five or six years of their lives...(while, yes, going into debt to do it....)
and yes, teaching is NOT indoctrination, at least not in the Western “liberal” tradition! These hardcore leftist commie/nazi professors (and administrators) need to be rooted out of academe ... not for their dangerous politics but for failing to teach in the first place.
_____
..... Pretty much agree here. But I say "these hardcore leftist commie/nazi professors (and administrators) need to be rooted out of academe ..." for their dangerous politics and for failing to teach in the first place.
One of his gems is appropriate for today.
"Freedom from fear, if I read St. John aright, is one of the planks in the platform of the Antichrist. But that freedom is delusory and evanescent, and is purchased only at the cost of spiritual and political enslavement. It ends at Armageddon. So in our time, as Yeats saw, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Lacking conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the captains and the kings yield to the fierce ideologues, the merciless adventurers, the charlatans and the metaphysically mad. And then, truly, when the stern and righteous God of fear and love has been denied, the Savage God lays down his new commandments. Sincere God-fearing men, I believe, are now a scattered remnant. Yet as it was with Isaiah, so it may yet be with us, that disaster brings consciousness of that stubborn remnant and brings, too, a renewed knowledge of the source of wisdom. Truth and hardihood may find a lodging in some modern hearts when the new schoolmen and the parsons, or some of them, are brought to confess that it is a terrible thing to be delivered into the hands of the living God. . . ." - "The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man" - Russell Kirk.
-—as usual, VDH nails it-—
One thing VDH fails to mention: students in the ‘60s and ‘70s were given a deferment if they were on the teacher track... that’s were all those progressive students and future administrators (bloat) originated. In my years at a “prestigious college”, I can’t remember more then maybe one interaction with “staff.” 50 years later and staff are everywhere and tuition, room and board is maybe 15-20 times it was in my era.
We shifted significant donations away from four colleges that wouldn’t stop commie/leftist/ Nazi/racist policies or agitation —- and gave the money to a couple far better schools instead. Not sure what additional steps we can take to help end this madness in academe but are sure open to ideas!
“This man, Victor Davis Hanson ...... I wish he lived right down the road so we could shoot the breeze from time to time.
He is a gem of a man.”
He should be governor of California.
Go into massive debt to send your kids to collge.
They (kids) come out of college with the "skills" of a 2 year old.
They know how to have temper tantrums, and need safe spaces, just to be able to handle every day life.
That’s a big step, for sure.
If more people knew or cared about where our universities are today and did the same, they’d be hurting maybe enough to wonder why...and consider changes...but honestly, it seems to me it’s a small picture of what our government has become, and it doesn’t look hopeful to me, because of the completely immoral core and lack of integrity in our leaders in general—the evil is too deep and too wide to “fix.”
Add to that, God is the Fixer.
May He have mercy on our nation, and other nations, and call to Himself many, many, many, to repentance and faith in His only begotten Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for our sins so that we might be forgiven, was raised from the dead, and sits at the right hand of God the Father, and will return—it looks like soon—to judge all those who are not alive in Christ, spiritually first, through faith in Him, and then physically, living for Him in the power of the Spirit until we are called home.
If VDH was governor he wouldn’t have time to keep writing books. He should stay where he is.
I agree, and since everything he writes is at least good, that's saying a lot.
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