"...So what’s his assessment of America’s best students?
“My students are know-nothings.”
“They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent.
But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation...
...Usually, people assume that this distressing situation is due to the failures of the modern education system.
But according to Deneen, that is not the case.On the contrary, he writes that modern students’ ignorance is the education system’s “crowning achievement… the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide.”
He explains:
“What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like ‘critical thinking,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘ways of knowing,’ ‘social justice,’ and ‘cultural competence.’
...Deneen is no pessimist.
He cares deeply for his students, and is frustrated that they haven’t been taught “what is rightfully theirs.”
But he is no false optimist either:
“But even on those better days, I can’t help but hold the hopeful thought that the world they have inherited—a world without inheritance, without past, future, or deepest cares—is about to come tumbling down, and that this collapse would be the true beginning of a real education.”
As Alasdair MacIntyre lamented in After Virtue,
“[T]he barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.”..."
No comments:
Post a Comment