Posted on 07/10/2007 6:31:26 AM PDT by kellynla
Is “ho”—the rapper slang for the slur “whore”—a bad word? Always, sometimes, or just when an obnoxious white male like Don Imus says it? But not when the equally obnoxious Snoop Dogg serially employs it?
Is the Iraq war, as we are often told, the “greatest mistake” in our nation’s history?
Because Israel and the United States have a bomb, is it then O.K. for theocratic Iran to have one too?
Americans increasingly cannot seem to answer questions like these adequately because they are blissfully uneducated. They have not acquired a broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history.
Sometime in the 1960s—perhaps due to frustration over the Vietnam War, perhaps as a manifestation of the cultural transformations of the age—the university jettisoned the classical approach [to education] and adopted the therapeutic.Instead, our youth for a generation have been fed a “Studies” curriculum. Fill in the blanks: Women’s Studies, Gay Studies, Environmental Studies, Peace Studies, Chicano Studies, Film Studies, and so on. These courses aim to indoctrinate students about perceived pathologies in contemporary American culture—specifically, race, class, gender, and environmental oppression.
Such courses are by design deductive. The student is expected to arrive at the instructor’s own preconceived conclusions. The courses are also captives of the present—hostages of the contemporary media and popular culture from which they draw their information and earn their relevance.
The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority. Once students understand how gender, race, and class distinctions are used to oppress others, they are then free to ignore absolute “truth,” since it is only a reflection of one’s own privilege.
By contrast, the aim of traditional education was to prepare a student in two very different ways. First, classes offered information drawn from the ages—the significance of Gettysburg, the characters in a Shakespeare play, or the nature of the subjunctive mood. Integral to this acquisition were key dates, facts, names, and terms by which students, in a focused manner in conversation and speech, could refer to the broad knowledge that they had gathered.
Second, traditional education taught a method of inductive inquiry. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, logic, and rhetoric were tools to be used by a student, drawing on an accumulated storehouse of information, to present well-reasoned opinions—the ideology of which was largely irrelevant to professors and the university.
Sometime in the 1960s—perhaps due to frustration over the Vietnam War, perhaps as a manifestation of the cultural transformations of the age—the university jettisoned the classical approach and adopted the therapeutic.
For each course on rap music or black feminism, one on King Lear or Latin is lost.Many educators and students believed that America was hopelessly corrupt and incorrigible. The church, government, military, schools, and family stifled the individual and perpetuated a capitalist, male hierarchy that had warped Western society. So if, for a mere four years, the university could educate students to counter these much larger sinister forces, the nation itself could be changed for the better. Colleges could serve as a counterweight to the insidious prejudices embedded in the core of America.
Unfortunately, education is a zero-sum game in which a student has only 120 units of classroom instruction. Not all classes are equal in the quality of knowledge they impart. For each course on rap music or black feminism, one on King Lear or Latin is lost.
Presentism and relativism are always two-edged swords: today’s Asian victims of racism are tomorrow’s Silicon Valley engineers of privilege. Last year’s “brilliant” movie of meaning now goes unrented at Blockbuster. Hypocrisy runs rampant: many of those assuring students that America is hopelessly oppressive do so on an atoll of guaranteed lifelong employment, summers off, high salaries, and few audits of their own job performance.
Once we understand this tragedy, we can provide prescribed answers to the three questions with which I started. “Ho,” like any element of vocabulary in capitalist society, is a relative term, not an absolute slur against women. “Ho” is racist and sexist when spoken by white men of influence and power, jocular or even meaningful when uttered by victims from the African-American male underclass.
If few Americans know of prior abject disasters during the winter of 1776, the summer of 1864, or January 1942, then why wouldn’t Iraq really be the worst mistake in our history?
If there are no intrinsic differences—only relative degrees of “power” that construct our “reality”—between a Western democracy that is subject to continual audit by a watchdog press, an active political opposition, and a freely voting citizenry, and an Iranian theocracy that bans free speech to rule by religious edict, then it will matter little which entity has nuclear weapons.
In the end, education is the ability to make sense of the chaotic present through the prism of the absolute and eternal truths of the ages. But if there are no prisms—no absolutes, no eternals, no truths, no ages past—then the present will appear only as nonsense.
Ping
After teaching in public schools and college for 45 years, this VDH essay needs to be sent to all 435 House Reps and 100 Senators. The USA is now an ignorant nation which allows such pacifist socialist views as expressed by the Kosites, the DNC, and the MSM to be inculcated without dispute. Perhaps the Second Coming is just around the Bend.
Liberals have been successful in their quest to dumb down the population enough to be controlled.
Saved, Forwarded and a BUMP!
Matthew 7
24 ¶ Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock:
25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.
26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:
27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.
Our Founding Fathers from over 200 years ago had a better education. Ah, progress...
Let me know if you want in or out.
Links: FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
His website: http://victorhanson.com/
NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
Pajamasmedia: http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/
BTTT
Cultural narratives are always complex. Each contain enough truth and history to establish legitimacy among their subscribers. Mutual ignorance abounds between cultures but it is their interpretations of shared historical and contemporary events that determines a culture's durability in conflict. That's really what the war on terror is about isn't it? It's about ending a culture of death, at home and abroad. But we don't know how to do that do we...? Instead we rightly fear that we are fostering it. IMO, propagating a culture of death is best done by dismissing its cult members as ignorant or incompetent, particularly when they are just that. As a result of being spurned by the culture of life - they will assert our irrelevance with more zeal than they assert their own irrelevance. Validation of their culture is equally damaging. In my opinion, there are only two cures for the culture of death:
In Iraq and Afghanistan we are finding the first prescription more difficult than we imagined. That's because we've not played favorites, empowering our enemies and allies alike. Empowering an enemy simply validates their culture - validates their perception of history - validates the culture of death. Empowering your enemies destroys your allies perception of events. Doing so sets your allies adrift on an intellectual road to conspiracy. But then again, what could we expect our allies to make of us when we harbor our own culture of death - made popular by lucrative media deals? Our own political inconsistencies are making the second prescription more likely.
In terms of our own hypocrisies... what could be worse than the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation.
Tupac Amaru Shakur was born in the The Bronx in New York City.[4] He was named after Túpac Amaru II, an Incan revolutionary who led a Peruvian uprising against Spain and was subsequently sentenced to death. "Shakur" comes from the Arabic word thankful (to God). His mother, Afeni Shakur, was an active member of the Black Panther Party in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s; Shakur was born just one month after her acquittal on more than 100 charges of "Conspiracy against the United States government and New York landmarks" in the New York Panther 21 court case.[5] Although officially unconfirmed by the Shakur family,[6] several sources list his birth name as either Parish Lesane Crooks[7][8] or Lesane Parish Crooks. Afeni supposedly feared her enemies would attack her son, and disguised their relation using a different last name, only to change it three months[7] or a year[9] later, following her marriage to Mutulu Shakur.
On September 7, 1996 at approximately 11:15 p.m., while stopped at the intersection of East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, Shakur was shot several times in a drive-by shooting. Shakur was struck by four bullets out of the twelve shots that were fired at him; he was hit twice in the chest, and once each in his left arm and thigh. Shakur was later placed on life support until his death six days later, on September 13, 1996, at 4:03 p.m. PDT at the age of twenty-five.
Later read
Classical education is popular among home schoolers.
Academia serves to pacify the masses. Nothing works better. But Americans, by definition, cannot be pacified. We were born to start righteous fights. Look at our history. Our insular decadence is sinusoidally married to our ambition to redefine the world. Maybe you haven't looked over the horizon lately. Even if you have, I don't think we are seeing the same things. My compatriot, we are not safe in this world because of who we are.
https://www.maa.org/reviews/humansurvival.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/26/eveningnews/main2855775.shtml
http://www.onenewsnow.com/2007/06/yaf_brings_leftist_campus_bias.php
http://www.thefire.org/index.php/redalert?PHPSESSID=fa49b156911114fe730ce75421fd8cb4
http://www.noindoctrination.org/
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/index.jsp
Sigh. Estimation and mental math techniques are good in some situations, but rarely in isolation. These folks are misguided; this line of thinking was can result in stupid errors like the Mars spacecraft that failed due to a unit error (centimeters and inches are not equivalent units).
As for the "Mathematics for Human Survival"...it's a lame and pathetic excuse for a college textbook. The fact that the book is even being recommended for use in teaching such concepts as percentages in a college-level class is a sad reflection of the dumbing down of the U.S. education system. I learned and mastered both concepts in elementary school, but then again, that was in the early 1990s.
Propaganda doesn't get us anywhere. Neither does statistical manipulation or dumbed down mathematics.
Our ignorance of "the same mathematics that we did years and years ago" will, however, reduce America's competitive advantage, relative to such rising powers as India and China.
“Propaganda doesn’t get us anywhere.”
It gets the anti-US left everywhere they want to go - destroying America’s superiority.
There’s nothing wrong with RateMyProfessors; it’s an informal course and teaching rating system.
No wonder I only got a 660 on the SAT II Writing yet have been complimented as a “very good writer” by my professors.
Then let’s make sure that if we go down, they come with us.
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