Posted on 10/30/2002 8:03:45 PM PST by cornelis
It is not so obvious that physical scientists need a liberal arts education, rooted in the study of language. They themselves assert that they have no time for it. They have insisted on the abolition of language requirements in almost every university graduate program in America. This development is directly related to the massive amount of fraud which now typifies scientific publication in this country. This scientific community has lost track of the historical and ethical roots of our civilization, the only civilization which has fostered the scientific ethic and considerable scientific research and discovery. Increasingly young men enter the sciences who do not understand that science is not a given, but an achievement, a tradition of research and discovery which si the hard-won accomplishment of one culture, fostered carefully and slowly for millenia until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scientists have lost touch with their own culture. They live without a narrative structure which frames and makes moral sense of their lives. They seem to belong to no culture and feel the claims of no cultural norms, claims that would be introduced and reinforced by a rigorous study of their own cultural traditions over the past twenty-five hundred years. For such people the borderline between fudging, misreporting of results, and outright fraud becomes as unclear as their own cultural heritage. All too often it is those who report or investigate such fraud who find themselves de-funded by the "profession." The attainment of truth is possible only within a tradition, as Alasdair MacIntyre has suggested. A rootless, traditionless, monoglot scientific elite has lost the basis of discovery, in science or any other area. Since they cannot discover truth and will not live without grants, they must lie.Recently conservatives have talked much of valuing creativity and an openness to the real world. If such an attitude is to be more than talk, we must face the fact that creativity is not found in every tradition. Ours is one of the few creative ones and we must work to re-establish our children's direct contact with that tradition, which is their own, after all. Despite all the changes recent decades have seen, culture is still transmitted primarily through language. The essential works necessary for understanding and transmitting our culture were written in Greek and Latin. Translations are marvelous tools, but no translation can be safely used or taught except by one who knows the original tongue. An educational curriculum founded on Greek and Latin gave us Jefferson and Adams, Burke and Samuel Johnson, not to mention Copernicus and Newton, Luther and Calvin, Michaelangelo and Bach. Educators have developed curricula and texts which can teach these languages on any level from pre-school through college. Most subjects that are important for formative education can be be taught through and with these languages. The materials are out there, lying in the warehouses of the Cambridge and Oxford University Presses. We have in our hands the making of a reactionary revolution of excellence. The questions we must ask ourselves are the following: Do we have the will to give our children their own culture back again? Do we have the courage to restore meaning and creativity to our nation?
But what exactly is horrible? There are many factors.
It is true that many of the great books programs spawned by the U of C have been hijacked by debunkers. In any case, the author directs us toward learning the languages. Good programs exists (even many at the high school level) that allow, through language, the texts to inform us.
This is one of the reasons for the popularity of alternative schooling.
What a nerve! Hasn't he heard about Michael Bellesisles (sp?), the History prof who was just fired from Emory for faking his gun-control data?
I understand the need for everyone to be educated about our history and culture, but the real transmission of ethics and values will only come through the family, the church, and to some extent our primary and secondary schools. By the time someone reaches college, making him go to classes in Greek and Latin is not going to make him an ethical person.
Much of what has gone wrong with this country in the past forty years has come from our forgetting the basic fact that first we have to make a living. I think learning about American history and even some about the classics is a wonderful thing. I've spent a great deal of time, particularly since leaving college, reading books about history. However, my first job is to make a living, and social science and humanities classes are not a part of my gaining the expertise needed to make a living.
Maybe when we reach the point where the average person won't spend half of his working life supporting the government, we can require technical people to waste their time on these nonsense classes. Until then, don't bother me. I have too much to do trying to support you.
WFTR
Bill
The difference between a wise teacher and an arrogant, postmodern fool is this: the former realizes that a journeyman carpenter needs tools and to be taught their use, the latter tries to present the carpenter with a finished house, ends up giving him or her a tarpaper shack and proclaims it a palace.
Kopff, who teaches classics at Boulder, noted that the educational curriculum was not a matter of texts, not classes.
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