A number of wise and insightful individuals have indicted the institutions of higher learning, and even warned that it presages an end to our democracy. Real leaning is gone, and replaced, almost totally, with one political philosophy.
1. Young people go to universities where they become prisoners of a mind-set and jargon that make it almost impossible for them to say anything fresh or insightful. They are trained to reduce the rich complexities and ambiguities of human life to simple formulas about oppressors and oppressed, capitalists and workers, Western imperialists and their non-Western victims.
Bawer, "The Victim's Revolution"
a. "People who have dedicated their lives to exposing lesbian imagery in Moby Dick are more prevalent on the nations campuses than serious scholars. The nations colleges and universities have become a Safe Streets program for traitors and lunatics."
Coulter
2. Almost needless to say, when they encounter a reality that doesn't fit their paradigm, they don't know how to deal with it, other than to make statements that are demonstrably untrue.
a. " Todays college liberals ape the beliefs of 99 percent of their professors and then pretend theyre on-the-edge radicals.
Let me give you a little tip: if you want liberalism to continue in this country, you have to realize that liberal students are being let down by their professors! They have liberal school teachers, and read the liberal press! Because of this weak preparation, they are unable to argue, to think beyond the first knee-jerk impulse. They cant put together a logical thought. Now, compare that to a college Republican "
Coulter
3. Graduate students in English who once would have learned to perform "close readings' of literary texts, which enhanced their understanding of the way in which a skillful use of language and structure creates an aesthetic effect, now learned absolutely nothing of such matters. Mark Bauerlein, English professor at Emory, writes that the postmodern humanities is nothing more than "catechism learning," a set of axioms to be assimilated: no in-depth research or critical thinking needed- just keep slinging rhetoric.
4. University curricula had once been concerned with the true, the good, and the beautiful, now is preoccupied with the evil triumvirate of 'isms'- colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, and all with the overlay of victimhood: class, race, and gender oppression.
a. In the latest iteration of learning at the college level, Western civilization is not analyzed through the use of reason or judged according to aesthetics standards that have been developed over centuries; rather, it is viewed through prisms of race, class, and gender, and hailed or condemned in accordance with certain political checklists.
5. "To Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, the present is a good time to be young only if you don't mind a tendency toward empty-headedness. In "The Dumbest Generation," he argues that cultural and technological forces, far from opening up an exciting new world of learning and thinking, have conspired to create a level of public ignorance so high as to threaten our democracy.... Mr. Bauerlein contrasts such "evidence-lite enthusiasm" for digital technologies with a weightier learning tradition. He eulogizes New York's City College in the mid-20th century, a book-centered, debate-fostering place where a generation of intellectuals rejected the "sovereignty of youth" in favor of the concerted study of canonical texts and big ideas." Can U Read Kant? - WSJ.com
a. Yale classicist Donald Kagan: "Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values."
"The essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make," Mr. Kagan says. "At the university, there must be intellectual variety. If you don't have [that], it's not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It's that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know or do think you know or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial." The Weekend Interview with Donald Kagan: 'Democracy May Have Had Its Day' - WSJ.com
6. To what do we owe this debilitation of higher education? Largely, to three specific works that are responsible for the political mentality that invests 'higher learning": Antonio Gramschi;s "Prison Notebooks;" Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed;" and Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth."
a. Consider the talented and tireless Ira Magaziner. As a student activist at Brown University in the late 1960s, he helped codify the no-requirements approach of the so-called New Curriculum (few grades, lots of self-discovery) and changed the face of modern academics.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HWW/is_9_4/ai_71561446/
We are on the edge of the abyss....and it is difficult to see a way back.
1. Young people go to universities where they become prisoners of a mind-set and jargon that make it almost impossible for them to say anything fresh or insightful. They are trained to reduce the rich complexities and ambiguities of human life to simple formulas about oppressors and oppressed, capitalists and workers, Western imperialists and their non-Western victims.
Bawer, "The Victim's Revolution"
a. "People who have dedicated their lives to exposing lesbian imagery in Moby Dick are more prevalent on the nations campuses than serious scholars. The nations colleges and universities have become a Safe Streets program for traitors and lunatics."
Coulter
2. Almost needless to say, when they encounter a reality that doesn't fit their paradigm, they don't know how to deal with it, other than to make statements that are demonstrably untrue.
a. " Todays college liberals ape the beliefs of 99 percent of their professors and then pretend theyre on-the-edge radicals.
Let me give you a little tip: if you want liberalism to continue in this country, you have to realize that liberal students are being let down by their professors! They have liberal school teachers, and read the liberal press! Because of this weak preparation, they are unable to argue, to think beyond the first knee-jerk impulse. They cant put together a logical thought. Now, compare that to a college Republican "
Coulter
3. Graduate students in English who once would have learned to perform "close readings' of literary texts, which enhanced their understanding of the way in which a skillful use of language and structure creates an aesthetic effect, now learned absolutely nothing of such matters. Mark Bauerlein, English professor at Emory, writes that the postmodern humanities is nothing more than "catechism learning," a set of axioms to be assimilated: no in-depth research or critical thinking needed- just keep slinging rhetoric.
4. University curricula had once been concerned with the true, the good, and the beautiful, now is preoccupied with the evil triumvirate of 'isms'- colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, and all with the overlay of victimhood: class, race, and gender oppression.
a. In the latest iteration of learning at the college level, Western civilization is not analyzed through the use of reason or judged according to aesthetics standards that have been developed over centuries; rather, it is viewed through prisms of race, class, and gender, and hailed or condemned in accordance with certain political checklists.
5. "To Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, the present is a good time to be young only if you don't mind a tendency toward empty-headedness. In "The Dumbest Generation," he argues that cultural and technological forces, far from opening up an exciting new world of learning and thinking, have conspired to create a level of public ignorance so high as to threaten our democracy.... Mr. Bauerlein contrasts such "evidence-lite enthusiasm" for digital technologies with a weightier learning tradition. He eulogizes New York's City College in the mid-20th century, a book-centered, debate-fostering place where a generation of intellectuals rejected the "sovereignty of youth" in favor of the concerted study of canonical texts and big ideas." Can U Read Kant? - WSJ.com
a. Yale classicist Donald Kagan: "Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values."
"The essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make," Mr. Kagan says. "At the university, there must be intellectual variety. If you don't have [that], it's not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It's that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know or do think you know or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial." The Weekend Interview with Donald Kagan: 'Democracy May Have Had Its Day' - WSJ.com
6. To what do we owe this debilitation of higher education? Largely, to three specific works that are responsible for the political mentality that invests 'higher learning": Antonio Gramschi;s "Prison Notebooks;" Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed;" and Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth."
a. Consider the talented and tireless Ira Magaziner. As a student activist at Brown University in the late 1960s, he helped codify the no-requirements approach of the so-called New Curriculum (few grades, lots of self-discovery) and changed the face of modern academics.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HWW/is_9_4/ai_71561446/
We are on the edge of the abyss....and it is difficult to see a way back.
