Posted on 09/15/2022 1:35:59 PM PDT by karpov
Like an overlong proxy war, the “canon” skirmishes of the 1980s and ’90s no longer feature in the media, though the conflict persists. As in a battle over this or that town, the ongoing war might manifest as a fight over particular books, but the real disagreement exists between competing visions for humanity and society.
Critics of the literary canon usually point to its preponderance of white males, but this antipathy toward tradition traces down to a more fundamental, even revolutionary, first principle. The radicals behind the anti-canon movement want more than the expansion of the existing canon; they want to eradicate any commitment to aesthetic ideals, objective truth, or moral imposition. Undergirding their resentment of Shakespeare or Tolstoy is a resentment of Western values as such, and so saving the canon is about more than saving Romeo and Juliet.
In an essay that astutely chronicles the original canon war, philosopher John Searle rightly observes that “opening up the canon” would not satisfy most professorial radicals; rather, “the whole idea of ‘the canon’” had to be abolished. Professor of education Henry Giroux expresses the more radical belief of the anti-canon proponents when he criticizes the mere liberals of the 1960s (as opposed to the postmodernists), who “remained partially constrained by modernist assumptions.” Postmodernism, meanwhile, “asserts no privileged place, aside from power considerations, for the art works, scientific achievements, and philosophical traditions by which Western Culture legitimates itself.”
Giroux says the quiet part out loud. Where a classical understanding of education helps a child align his mind to objective reality and his actions to objective morality, the radicals wanted to eradicate any constraint from without. A canon of literature assumes objective standards of beauty, truth, and goodness, and so it must go.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
We need to implement an ongoing updating of the Sokal Hoax every few years.
“A canon of literature assumes objective standards of beauty, truth, and goodness, and so it must go.”
Yep, it boils down to eliminating any idea of objective standards. But that’s not even the deepest level that this “demon” possessing academia is operating at.
The reason they want to get rid of objective standards of beauty, truth, etc, is because these are simply reflections of the deepest objective standard: objective morality. You can’t have an objective standard of morality without admitting the existence of a deity. And that is something that a post-Enlightenment Western intellectual can rarely ever bring themselves to admit.
"Every behavioral consequence, every act of praise, every curricular decision communicates something to students and provides them with an ideal: What does it mean to be an educated individual living a life worth emulation?
What does the progressive ideal present to students? What values does it communicate? That their personal desires ought to be the final arbiter of morality? That their own interests should be the only judge of what actions are worth doing or not doing? That any imposition of responsibility from outside themselves can and should be ignored?
Next time a postmodernist wants go coast-to-coast over Flyover Country, let him/her/xim take a magic carpet and not privilege the Western science, math, engineering, and industry that underlies air travel. Likewise for medical treatment, drinking water, sewer systems.
Firstly, someone that uses the phrase “critical pedagogies” should just be given the silent treatment and ushered out of polite society.
Speaking strictly about math and science, reading the original works of the great historical mathematicians and scientist would be a huge waste of time. Their terminology and notation would be different from that of today, and you would be learning all of their mistakes along with their contributions.
For example, Great Books Volume 11 has works by Archimedes, Euclid, Apollonius, and Nichomachus. Learning the geometry of conic sections without the tools of analytic geometry is pretty useless.
Great Books Volume 16 has Ptolemy’s Almagest. There is no reason to learn a geocentric model of celestial mechanics for anything other than a historical interest.
Volume 54 is Freud, which again is only of historical interest.
I’m less versed in philosophy, but any of the works dealing with perception and consciousness prior to late 20th Century advancements in neurology and brain function are largely bunk.
To believe otherwise is to believe that any class could attempt to develop a canon, belief system, legislation, etc, in an effort to benefit all classes and not simply that of the ones supposedly responsible for the development; to do so requires a belief in objective good and not simply self-interest, which must be and is furiously denied by ignorance and intellectual laziness posing as cynicism. It's easier to deny something than it is to understand it.
The real difficulty with critical pedagogy is that it undoes itself - teaching it, if true, is simply another example of itself. If pedagogy, or law, or race relations is simply a power game, then pretending that what changes is the people playing it is necessarily false. Nothing changes. The worm has eaten itself.
Absolutely. And worse, you have to believe in it in order to understand it - that was Horkheimer - so all social understanding must run through the filter of class analysis. That isn’t reason, it’s cult membership.
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