Posted on 03/17/2024 2:42:14 PM PDT by Rummyfan
In its typically clueless way, The New Yorker is hot on the topic of whether the liberal arts—and especially classical education—have gone conservative. (The article is titled, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?”) Better break out the smelling salts.
You’d think this is an easy question. The left have attacked or hollowed out the liberal arts on campus, and the only people who take the classics seriously, and on their own terms, are conservatives. Leftist intellectuals insist on reading all classical literature through the current ideological filters, and students find it repellent, irrelevant, and above all boring.
Emma Green, The New Yorker‘s oblivious writer, offers up gems like this:
In many public schools, kids learn to read by guessing words using context clues, rather than by decoding the sounds of letters. In most classical schools, phonics reign, and students learn grammar by diagramming sentences. Some public schools have moved away from techniques like memorization, which education scholars knock as “rote learning” or “drill and kill”—the thing that’s killed being a child’s desire to learn. In contrast, classical schools prize memory work, asking students to internalize math formulas and recite poems. And then there’s literature: one New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity featuring characters named Aristotle and Dante. In classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante. . .
...
The article improves some as it goes, noting that classical education is catching on in . . . Africa. I’m sure leftist race-mongers will say this is a sign that colonialism is coming back.
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
Classic Liberal Arts IS and always has been aligned with conservative thought.
My education was Great Books. The classics were conservative then.
We believe in merit and college entrance exams for a reason. Our kids aren't idiots. Progressive kids might know Marxism, kinkm and have street cred but past that and they're zeros...
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