Whatever Happened to the Teaching of Western Civilization?

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | April 17, 2020 | Robert Paquette

[karpov]

Stanley Kurtz ranks as one of this country’s most insightful critics of higher education. The National Association of Scholars chose wisely in commissioning him to write a report on what has happened to the teaching of Western civilization on the postmodern campus. For those worried about the future of the republic, The Lost History of Western Civilization offers little solace. The opposition has reached the red zone and appears close to putting the game away.

Kurtz’s potent and well-written diagnosis does go a long way toward identifying the more prominent “scholarly” culprits responsible for what can only be described as a great betrayal of the ethos of liberal arts education. As the folks behind the 1619 Project at The New York Times understand all too well, the deposits of wisdom that form the foundation of a civic culture necessary to sustain a free society cannot be defended if they are not taught or taught only in politicized caricature.

In truth, the presence of activist professors and students on campus long preceded the onslaught against a curriculum that featured mandatory core courses centered on a canon of Great Books, a canon that was never as static as its critics maintained. The question that has to be asked, over and over again, is: Why did so many college presidents and boards of trustees at our finest institutions, the very beneficiaries in most cases of a coherent and demanding liberal arts education, so quickly and abjectly surrender to the transformationalists? Leaving the curriculum only to the faculty amounts to dereliction of fiduciary responsibility.

Kurtz’s three-part investigation begins at Stanford University in 1987. He examines the trend-setting ruckus there that ended up dismantling the university’s Western civilization requirement after its rebirth from a previous collapse in the 1960s.

[Cboldt]

Suicide of the West. James Burnham. 1961, IIRC, 1963 at the latest.

It’s deliberate.

[a fool in paradise]

Cultural Marxism

[Fiddlstix]

GREAT
POST!

[a fool in paradise]

Dead white males

[Bernard Marx]

This is closing the barn door after the horses have gone. Somehow our “great thinkers” and activists on the Right have failed to effectively fight back against 60 years of attacks on Western Civ. The only organization I know of that’s making any positive moves is the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Lynne Cheney was one of the movers and shakers in getting the organization rolling but it’s vastly underfunded and overpowered by the academic Left.

[Pelham]

The antidote:

"Another Sort of Learning" by James Schall

[wildbill]

My Columbia—the college of the 50s and early 60s required two years of study in Western Civilization (Contemporary Civilization) with a year invested in philosophy, religious texts, political movements and changes, etc and a final year in the humanities and arts and music. What a wonderful education it was and each Columbia graduate had a broadly similar base of education to draw on in discussions into his future decades.

I hear all that was wonderful in learning about the glories of our common past from which a distinct cultural ethos of America was born is gone now. Replaced by negative deconstruction of every facet of human endeavor in the West for the past 3000 years. It is the work of “little” men to destroy “giants” because they were part of their time and culture, overlooking the good that they did to become worthy of their titles and honors.