Posted on 03/31/2015 9:47:11 AM PDT by jazusamo
An op-ed piece titled "Conservatives, Please Stop Trashing the Liberal Arts" appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal. But it is not conservatives who trashed the liberal arts.
Liberal professors have trashed the liberal arts, by converting so many liberal arts courses into indoctrination centers for left-wing causes and fads, instead of courses where students learn how to weigh conflicting views of the world for themselves. Now a professor of English, one of the most fad-ridden of the liberal arts today, blames conservative critics for the low esteem in which liberal arts are held.
Surely a professor of English cannot be unaware of how English departments, especially, have become hotbeds of self-indulgent, trendy fads such as trashing classic writings — using Shakespeare's works as just another ideological playground for romping through with the current mantra of "race, class and gender."
Surely he cannot be unaware of the many farces of the Modern Language Association that have made headlines. And when our English professor uses a phrase like "critical thinking," he must be at least dimly aware of how often those words have been perverted to mean uncritical negativism toward traditional values and uncritical acceptance of glittering catchwords of the left, such as "diversity."
Diversity of political ideas is not to be found on most college campuses, where the range of ideas is usually from the moderate left to the extreme left, and conservatives are rare as hen's teeth among the faculty — especially in English departments. Academics who go ballistic about an "under-representation" of ethnic minorities in various other institutions are blissfully blind to the under-representation of conservatives among the professors they hire. On many campuses, students can go through all four years of college without ever hearing a conservative vision of the world, even from a visiting speaker.
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
“I don’t always talk to liberal arts majors. But when I do, I order a LARGE fries”.
We don’t trash liberal arts, merely those who teach it : )
May my conservative English professor dad, rest in peace.
Nothing wrong with liberal arts aside from what most schools have done to them.
Hillsdale college is a liberal arts school and most conservatives would be proud to have a son or daughter in attendance.
He makes good sense. I graduated with a degree in this during the 70s when the courses were all dedicated to the greatest literature and art that Western Civilization could offer.
Amen and God bless him.
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sent by a leftist activist
He has.
So very true.
Again.
Sowell = genius.
Google “critical thinking” and then google “critical theory”. Both are part of the Frankfurt School’s indoctrination program. Critical thinking is literally “critical”, as in fault-finding thinking. It is not analytic thinking, that is a different bird altogether.
The problem is that Hillsdale is one of only a handful of colleges/universities in the U.S. that even permit conservative thought on campus. The hugely overwhelming number of choices for students, as the article says, range from left to far left.
I understand it is very competitive to get into, but those who do have access to student loan rates far better than the federal program.
Hillsdale rejected the government loan program over 30 years ago and has their own group of lenders offering better rates.
It is what happens when you turn out useful graduates who tend to get better jobs and, thus, have a much lower rate of default on their loans.
I like Sowell, but I do not think he is a genius. Just a conservative thinker (which is as rare as a genius).
Where else could a student sit and hear speakers as diverse as Frederick Douglass, Ronald Reagan, Margret Thatcher, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Michelle Malkin etc etc etc
The point of a liberal arts education is to produce an educated man. It is not the same thing, and not intended necessarily to be the same thing as job training.
The left have destroyed liberal arts education. I agree with Sowell.
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