Posted on 06/17/2008 12:48:20 PM PDT by shrinkermd
An exceptional essay well worth reading.
A few excerpts are:
"...What the university offered, then, became no different from the fare of a television station, a local movie theater, rap concert, or a government bureaucracy: the more the campus devolved into popular life, the less it had to offer anything of rarity or singular beauty—confirming Plato’s pessimism that the radical egalitarian appeal to mass appetites must lead to arts of a lesser and more accessible quality. If half-educated strippers and sex entertainers are deemed street artists or populist philosophers, then they can now be welcomed to campus, exempt from both the charge of sexual exploitation and pornography by reciting anti-American poetry and offering anti-Western quips as they unclothe and fondle themselves before cheering college audiences. A Ward Churchill is the emblem of today’s university provocateur and entertainer, posing as the everyman professor with beads, buckskin, and an automatic rifle, enhanced and protected by bogus credentials
The decline of a classical core in the university also meant that the tragic view was eclipsed by the therapeutic. Following the spread of the social sciences, a second generation of “Studies” classes—African-American, Asian, Chicano, Feminist, Gay, Environmental, or Peace—proliferated in the curriculum. Their common theme was anti-classical in at least three ways. One, there are always new disciplines of learning that spring up, rather than a finite set of knowledge: Homer’s portrayal of Penelope, Helen, Calypso, and Circe cannot be fathomed without feminist theory; deconstructing colonialism and imperialism, not reading Virgil or Tacitus, has finally allowed us to understand state exploitation. Rather than ask what philosophy or history might say about contemporary pathologies from poverty to racism, the university instead invented ex nihilo whole programs about racial and economic mistreatment, mostly as a way of casting blame
(Excerpt) Read more at newcriterion.com ...
This is a great essay.
BTTT
Liberalism is indeed a mental disease, but curable - albeit requiring a new brain.
As to Political Correctness:
The following is the 2007 winning entry from an annual
contest at Texas A&M University calling for the most
appropriate definition of a contemporary term.
This year’s term was: Political Correctness
The winner wrote:
‘Political Correctness is a doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up
a turd by the clean end.’
This is a great essay.
It has got to the point that the longer you have spent at university, the less you know, and the less reliable what you know, or think you know.
I’ll quibble about one thing. Hansen complains (mildly) that vocational and technical training has subtracted from what a university education ought to be. I would say that vocational and technical training is all that is left of any value; most of the rest has sunk to the level of mindless indoctrination; we are paying these people to indoctrinate our kids in the most obtuse and simple-minded heresies. Silliness has supplanted education almost completely, so if you aren’t there for a technical or science degree, you are asking for a slow-motion lobotomy.
In most cases, you’d be better off to do a tour of duty in the navy.
ping
At least around here there are those who claim the “en” makes for a Danish heritage. I don't know. But the essay was great.
Indeed, professors and students are now denouncing perceived Western pathologies only through a tradition of Western empiricism and free expression of thought, unavailable elsewhere.
This is the self-contradictory nature of most of these intellectual fads. Without a grounding in the precepts and methodologies of Western thought, the condemnation thereof is possible only to someone who has replaced it with...well, with what? A grounding in religious dogmatism, whether it be Muslim or Marxist? No grounding at all? One imagines the pole and places the fulcrum on fairy-dust and still one is short a place to stand before one can shift the earth.
A fourth culprit in the decline of the university was vocationalism, especially in larger public universities where the majority of the nation’s students were enrolled.
Return on investment was always an issue with regard to a university education, going back to the earliest universities. I don't fault this, myself, at least insofar as it has been principally at universities where the degree of specialization of knowledge is sufficient to prepare men and women for the demands of an increasingly technical job market. But even at its most specialized the existence of core courses meant that an individual with such an intention must at least also possess certain extra exposure that benefited them in other ways. "Our purpose is not to turn men into carpenters, it is to turn carpenters into men," said W.E.B. DuBois, and for once that unrepentant old communist was correct.
And yet the environment now is such that one must constantly defend the utility, and not the intrinsic beauty, of the classics. Those aren't really the best grounds on which to construct such a defense, but it still can and must be done. What good, for example, does knowledge of Thucydides' exposition on the plight of the Melians hold for a computer programmer? In terms of programming computers, not much. In terms of allowing that individual to understand the position of small nations bordered by aggressive neighbors in contemporary history, quite a bit. And that computer programmer must vote, and not on the basis of computer programming.
It is curious that the United States is fortunate to possess a little enclave of classical learning in, of all places, the armed forces currently deployed to the Middle East. One might snicker at the idea of Marines reading Xenophon, and one would be wrong. The March Up by Bing West and "E-tool" Smith is a knowing and eerie echo of the Anabasis. How does an army made up of small, highly-motivated and highly independent soldiers fare in an environment where the enemy is large, centrally-directed, and paralyzed by command and communications problems? West and Smith knew what they were looking at because Xenophon told them.
One of my favorite neighbors down in the little university town where I work is a professor of Latin and Greek, the head classicist for the school. He's retiring, and as things stand now he won't be replaced. That program will be taken over by people for whom the classics are a secondary field. Or it will die altogether. Or both. It isn't a good feeling.
Bump for later reading
There, fixed it.
Thank You, from New Mexico
I wonder how many on this board would devalue a classical education because it’s not “practical” or “functional”?
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