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.
Sending your chldren to government (public) schools is flat out child abuse, absolutely no doubt about it.
all those links were IMO a GOOD way to assess schools and professors for leftist bias.
“Suicide is one of the leading causes of death among US young adults. There is a reason for that.”
Yeah. The reason is that once you eliminate contagious disease, starvation, wild animal attack, and food poisoning, the only things left that kill young adults in large numbers are violence and accidents. And with modern medical trauma treatment available death rates due to accidents and non-self-inflicted violence are way down.
What does that leave?
Suicide.
It’s a feature, not a bug. Honest.
LOL-I remember one graduate TA in a Department over in UVa.'s College of Arts & Sciences who was rated as "blazingly hot" but "hardcore liberal."
But, more generally, yes, public K-12 schools are terrible.
Even magnet schools do not teach fundamentals such as US history, history of western civ, etc etc... Moral Relavatism is the order of the day in the public school system.
Yes some do better than others with reading, math and english, but don’t think for one minute they are teaching your kids fundamentals.
That is true, and I always, myself, try to distill some wisdom from pertinent history.
But, alas, I find Santayana's aphorism often encourages the morons (who are plentiful). Case in point, the recent immigration debate. How many times did you hear America's turn-of-the-century immigration experience invoked as precedent proving the wisdom of opening the border with a third-world country a century later under vastly different circumstances?
And, of course, the French famously built their Maginot Line to thwart Hitler, having "learned from history" how to protect themselves from German invasions.
History instructs, but, more often, it sends its students off half cocked, IMO.
My seventh grade U.S. History teacher required us to memorize portions of the Declaration and Constitution, as well as parts of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. She was part of the "old guard" of teachers.
My U.S. history teacher at TJHSST taught us facts and required us to write coherent papers. My U.S. Government teacher at the same school did the same, although he was one of those "moderates."
Maybe I am blessed...or maybe it's the fact that the public schools in Northern Virginia are not that bad, although moral relativism is slowly creeping in, in some places.
Those old guard are retiring and dying... most of your new guard are post 60s educated moral relativists.
I highly doubt your old guard would have remotely imagined she’d have orders to teach kindergardeners homosexuality is normal.
When your child is in public school they are a WARD OF THE STATE for 6 to 8 hours a day, that’s the facts.
Colleges have not "lost their way" so much as their "way" was redirected.
Ignorance we can fix.
Semper Fi, sir.
Good post! Good demonstation how the first reaction that many of us would have to a factoid ("suicide now a leading cause of death!") is misguided. Truth can be subtle and elusive.
Ahh one of my best memories is the time she presciently predicted to a couple of us seventh-graders that Saddam would one day get booted out of power by the United States.
Yes, the old guard is fading away. 'Tis a pity; I had very good teachers during my elementary and middle school years in the 1990s, and TJHSST is a science and tech magnet school, so many of my teachers there, although not necessarily conservatives, emphasized facts, logic, and reason.
King Lear - That an airplane, right? What did they have course’s on that for.
Went to your site.
I was encouraged at first, until I saw that their list of criteria for being a “college of character” included
“diversity education”,
which is pure garbage. There is no value in “diversity”, and as a matter of a recent study, it has actual detrimental effects on a community.
No need to read buoks, we have the history channel.
We’re going to homeschool, and yes, we’re going to use a classical approach and teach Christian values.
The worry that I have now is, who do I entrust my kids to after they graduate (home) high school?
The ‘History Chanel’ is history for people who don’t know anything about history.
And WAAAYYYY too many commercials. I almost never watch it anymore.
There are some conservative colleges/universities out there,but there comes a point when you have to let go and have faith that you have instilled proper values and judgement in your young person having led them to always seek TRUTH.
I’m not advocating that we dump them into hotbeds of liberalism as a test to see if they sink or swim. On the other hand if we’ve done our job as parents to prepare them for the real world they should do well wherever they go. Even in those hotbeds they will be able to judge people and ideas that stand against TRUTH.
“Be very careful where your son or daughter matriculates.”
There are times when I truly miss Norm Crosby.
First, they’re exclusive and under-represent the under-privileged; they also lead to higher rates of failure among the traditionally oppressed and contribute to the already high suicide rate among minority students; they are used by the rich and unnaturally gifted to segregate society by forming secret societies within the ranks of unprepared innocent newcomers who are shunned at every turn and slink back to the depths of the intellectual ghetto.
The course work should be made inclusive of all and degrees should be reserved for the non-totalitarian, empowering curricula.
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