Last fall I taught my last class, ending a teaching career that began in the fall of 1977. During that time I watched as higher education deteriorated under the pressures of leftist ideology, rank careerism, bureaucratic inertia, and philistine utilitarianism. The humanities––English, foreign languages, philosophy, history, the arts––have been particularly corrupted.
Worse, liberal education, the passing on of the traditions, foundational ideas, and collective wisdom of the West, has been virtually banished from most of our schools and colleges. Universities, with a few exceptions, no longer ground students in liberal education, and teach them “to know the best that has been known and thought in the world, irrespective of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other consideration whatsoever,” as Matthew Arnold put it, and “through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”
Those days are gone. Today our educational institutions are grubby, rent-seeking businesses, and propaganda organs for illiberal, incoherent ideologies based on the “higher nonsense” that has captured “higher education,” and from there trickled down into K-12 schools. No wonder the majority of the products of those failed institutions, like Generation Z, support letting murderers go free, censoring speech that challenges their “stock notions and habits,” joining the anti-carbon “green” cult, and subjecting children to drag-queen shows and inappropriate sexual curricula.
The most important tool in this demolition has been the dishonest idea of “diversity” created out of thin air by the 1978 Bakke decision. The legalization of Constitutionally forbidden discrimination in university admissions and hiring put the weight of federal power behind illiberal identity-politics. As a corollary to the increasing numbers of “protected” classes eligible for affirmative action, there was soon spawned attacks on liberal education for being the products of “dead white males”––not just irrelevant for contemporary students “of color,” but absolutely toxic in their promotion of the defining principles of a peculiarly destructive, racist, imperialist, colonialist Western Civilization, global history’s most heinous villain.
W.E.B Dubois once called reading the great books “cross[ing] the color line,” but in the reign of identity politics it’s scorned as “acting white.”
It was the universities, of course, that also created and promulgated the specious, anti-American, anti-Constitutional narrative justifying this degradation. “Multiculturalism,” a term eclipsed these days by “woke” and “systemic racism,” was the Orwellian tool for imposing identity politics and a mendacious “diversity” on university curricula and policies.
Marketed as merely a recognition of American ethnic diversity and respect for different cultures and ethnicities––a concern of “educators” in the Thirties and Forties, when it was called “pluralism”–– multiculturalism became a melodrama of guilty oppressors and innocent victims. On one side is the wicked West, the purveyors of imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and a generalized contempt for the Rest; on the other side are the peoples “of color” upon whom the West preyed.
This narrative, now repackaged as being “woke,” is a travesty of actual history, as its latest iteration, the “1619 Project,” demonstrates. This attempt to rewrite American history as the chronicle of white supremacy, racism, and slavery, as well as being a rehash of Howard Zinn’s 1980 fantastical The People’s History of the United States, has been refuted by numerous scholars of American history, including liberal ones.
Or take the notion that imperialism and colonialism are uniquely Western evils. But history shows us that peoples migrating, occupying, and exploiting the land and resources of others is the global dynamic of historical change. One of most famous abusers of the scare-terms imperialism and colonialism have been modern Muslims, adherents of a faith that created one of history’s most successful colonial empires.
As Middle East historian Efraim Karsh documents in Islamic Imperialism, “The Arab conquerors acted in a typically imperialist fashion from the start, subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth, resources, and labor.” And while Europeans have long ago surrendered their colonies, and continue to provide them foreign aid, the descendants of Muslim conquerors and colonizers still occupy lands that were Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian––i.e. Western––for centuries.
Then there’s slavery, a universal human evil found everywhere before the modern age, and regarded as no more exceptional than the domestication of animals. But the now common assumption that slavery is evil started in the West. Only in ancient Greece in the 4th century B.C. can you find an antislavery sentiment like Alcidamas’s unprecedented statement, “The god gave freedom to all men, and nature creates no one a slave.” And it was Christians in England and the U.S. who started the abolitionist movement in the early 19th century that spread, along with Western power and the British Navy, to the whole world.
Or what about sexism? Male domination of women was also universal, despite the myth of matriarchy. But the Western notions of unalienable human rights, political freedom, and equality provided the arguments for women’s liberation from laws and customs that violated these foundational precepts. And it was Western science and technology that liberated women from nature’s ruthless and lethal reproductive imperative, as well as back-breaking physical labor.
Meanwhile, traditional Islamic doctrines have kept women subordinated to men both in custom and in law. The protests roiling Iran today started with a woman murdered by the “Morality Police” for not wearing a hijab––and protesting women who are virgins are raped before being executed, so that they can’t go to heaven. We should also remember the tens of thousands of sex-slaves created by ISIS and other jihadist outfits during their rampage in Syria.
The point is not that Westerners are superior human beings, but that they are the heirs of a dynamic culture that embraces change and improvement over time. The sins of the West are the universal sins of a flawed human nature; but its virtues arose mainly in the West, and from there have expanded everywhere.
Multiculturalism and its “woke” successor have prevailed across our society and politics, from government policy to Disney cartoons, corporate boards and C-Suites, churches, and popular culture. And it thrives because for the last half-century, our universities have abandoned teaching foundational skills, and the liberal education that once taught students how “through this knowledge, [to turn] a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”
In other words, our universities have failed in their primary reason for existing: to give citizens the knowledge and principles that make them fit for enjoying and properly exercising the rare gift of political equality, participation, and freedom not limited to the wealthy or well-born. That too is a boon that first arose in the West, a truth acknowledged by the use of “democratic” and “republic” in the names of totalitarian nations.
Finally, cleansing the Augean Stable that comprise our schools is a superhuman task. Too many interests are served, from leftists to corporations, state governments to teachers’ unions. For now our hope lies in the proliferation of school-choice policies, home-schooling, and charter schools. But to paraphrase Adam Smith, there’s a lot of ruin in government agencies. Reclaiming our schools is going to be a long, hard slog.
The universities have become Marxist summer camps
For Liberal Arts, that is correct.
For the Natural Sciences, not so much YET. The Progesso-fascists and their science denials (“there are 57 genders” or whatever), would likely still try to corrupt this too.
They’ve already made huge inroads into the sciences, natural sciences too. From AGW to biology and immunology ‘science’ is already conforming to politics. It’s been going on since the 80s. If your climate research doesn’t reach the politically desired conclusion, your grants dry up.
That leftist tactic was first observed by me in gun control research. In the late 70s, Wright and Rossi set out to prove gun control would reduce crime, and were generously funded to do so. But they were honest enough to report the truth they found and it was so conclusive they even changed their own opinions. Suddenly their funding fell off. Frauds like Kellerman who reached the politically correct conclusions, though they had to torture data and methodogy to absurd lengths, then got the funding and publicity.
Now I’ve seen that if someone’s climate, or since covid, immunology research doesn’t reach the predetermined conclusions, not only does the funding dry up, it’s actively supressed.
It will be a long hard slog to regain the culture. Back in the 1950s, both Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand argued that this long fight has to focus on changing the foundational thought in the universities. Conservatives rejected that notion.
The 1950s conservatives dismissed “abstractions” and “philosophy” as “ideologies”. They said tradition, prejudice, and disposition would do with the Churches being our refuge.
What happened?
A new illiberal tradition arose. Prejudice and disposition today are dominated by woke anti-white hysteria. And the Churches? Pope Francis as well as the mainstream Protestants are firmly progressive. We didn’t fight the long battle of philosophy and academic thought … now we’ve lost the minds of the younger generation. The long hard fight can’t be avoided.
Hear! Hear!
The secular conservatives (and there are secular conservatives who simply pretend to really believe in religion when they actually don’t, but they go along to get along, and most importantly they know of no alternative to religion that can save America and the West) and the religious conservatives do not realize, do not know, that only a RADICAL, EXTREMIST, FUNDAMENTALIST, PHILOSOPHICAL, REVOLUTION, can save America and the American way of life.
That philosophical and above all MORAL revolution is Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism which offers a rational, irrefutable, moral defense, of individualism and capitalism.
There is no other way. To go back to Judeo-Christianity is to go back to unreason, faith, and mysticism, from which base only the tyranny of theocracy is possible.
Freedom, liberty, capitalism, and the personal pursuit of happiness on earth, are NOT religious, mystical, supernatural, values derived from faith in the supernatural, they are SECULAR values derived from REASON. They are secular values not only because they are derived from reason but because those values have nothing to do with the desire to die and escape to a supernatural after-life. Those secular values are solely, urgently, and crucially concerned with pursuing this natural life on earth.
We are now the counterculture?
Conservatism is the new Counter Culture.
I support a man like Trump who is against War.
Neil Young and David Crosby calls Trump a dangerous man.
Go figure..
Actually, we are, and have been for decades.
Universities changed to garner more females, but the feminists came instead. Education ends with questions and answers being classified as offensive. The biggest plus about old universities was ” nobody cares if you fail” they were concerned with those who succeed, it isn’t for everyone.
” nobody cares if you fail” – that was drilled into us in HS college prep courses in the 80s.
The subject story is about the propagandization of our college-age children by American universities. Our country, IMO, is in great jeopardy for the continuation of constitutional representative government. The damage being done by American universities is certainly a great part of this. But the larger issue, IMO, is that our country is greatly (and I think, more or less, evenly) divided concerning this matter, and so long as this state of affairs continues, I see but one of two outcomes to the problem. Our country CANNOT/WILL NOT continue living indefinitely in such a state of affairs, and thus, either our country will fracture (however this may come about, whether peacefully or by civil war) and become two or more different countries, or a large part of the American people MUST change their presently held fundamental views. And the only thing that I can think of which would cause the latter to occur is to refer everyone to what happened in the old U. S. S. R. when it collapsed financially because of its debt and thereby ceased to exist. So, to restate this, perhaps the only thing that can ‘save’ our country is a financial collapse on the magnitude of the Great Depresssion in the United States of the 1930s, or maybe a financial depression that is even worse. Maybe THAT is what will be required to bring sanity to the minds of many of the ‘woke’ (i.e., the Marxists) in our country.
An economic collapse into poverty and misery is not enough to produce a philosophical and moral conviction and revolution for the pursuit of happiness and prosperity on earth — for individualism and capitalism.
If a people are morally convinced that misery and poverty on earth is the MORAL way to live they will choose misery and poverty over happiness and prosperity.
The one-thousand years of the Christian Dark Ages are proof of that. The 1,400 years of the Muslim Dark Ages which are still with us are proof of that.
Why did the Christians during the Christian Dark Ages turn away from the pursuit of happiness on earth and willingly wallow in apathy, self-denial, self-abnegation, theocratic tyranny, poverty, and misery for one-thousand years? Why did they turn away from the healthy, life-affirming, virtues of pride, self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-assertiveness? Because they took Christianity SERIOUSLY. They were morally convinced that man was born a depraved sinner by virtue of Original Sin and this earthly life was a punishment for disobeying God.
They were MORALLY convinced that the moral purpose of this earthly life was to seek forgiveness, salvation, and redemption from God, and then die and escape this earthly life for the reward of an eternal utopia in the supernatural Kingdom of Christ. The misery and poverty were MORALLY deserved and MORALLY worth enduring.
“In spite of all their irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right and will not oppose the morality they have accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves. The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers—and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.” – Ayn Rand
Love this quote for a myriad of reasons. Apropos to this article, and lets face it, she is brilliant in this revelation.
Do you count yourself as a historian of the Middle Ages too? You have no idea what you’re talking about as anyone can plainly see by your sweeping and grossly inaccurate generalizations. Why did Christians turn away from …. (all that is good) “for a thousand years”? They didn’t! They turned inward for reasons of survival in a savage world. Islamic invasions – including naval warfare on the Mediterranean Sea – shutdown trade from Sweden to Libya in the west. In the east, and after centuries of warfare to resist the early Jihadists, the Ottomans finally captured Constantinople in 1453, which sent the Eastern Empire elites fleeing west but bringing with them a revival of ancient Greek philosophy and culture. The refugees brought the seeds that would become the Renaissance, but meanwhile, Christian clerics and monks established cloistered centers of learning. No one turned away from all that is good; rather, Christians were forced to keep the invaders outside the walls of their cities, but inside, they did what they could to keep the light of faith burning. Your claim of the superiority of an “amoral,” “rational” life is bunk.
The Soviet Dictatorship collapsed and became what? A Russian fascist dictatorship once again invading and making war with its neighbors. The Nazi Dictatorship collapsed and became what? Half of Germany went communist, the other half socialist, and now united Germany is fascist. An economic collapse is not enough for a philosophical and moral revolution for the pursuit of personal happiness on earth, for individualism and capitalism.
“An “anti-something” movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. Its passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program that they attack. People must fight for something they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be. They must, without any reservations, endorse the program of the market economy.” – Ludwig von Mises
I like your analysis but doubt that even an economic calamity would wake them up. Given the Left’s information dominance and the ignorant gullibility of so much of our population, an economic calamity would only convince them that it was the fault of capitalism, further fueling their drive for an authoritarian one party state. This country is royally screwed.
You make a good point.
If you want to save America and the American way of life, which is the personal pursuit of happiness on earth, which means INDIVIDUALISM and CAPITALISM, you have to start teaching Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism at the universities. That is the answer, there is no other way.
“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” – Abraham Lincoln
“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” ― Aristotle
“The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy’s impotence, but the proof of philosophy’s power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state—it is only philosophy that can lead them out.” – Ayn Rand
I recommend teaching the philosophy of Ayn Rand, in understandable little tidbits, to schoolchildren. For this I have started with the Tuttle Twins books for my grandchildren in preschool.
I have never heard of the Tuttle Twins books. I just went to their website and I’m very impressed. Thanks for introducing me to them.
Most children are not ready for formal philosophy until about the age of 16.
As recently as recently, a college student said he was puzzled that American Communists were treated as “the Good Guys”. “It was like hearing about organized crime from the perspective of the criminals”.
Senator McCarthy warned us about the plans of the Commie scum and Hollywood makes putrid movies full of commie propaganda(Ant Bully, The Butler, Reds, Etc.)and the Brainwashing starts with the NEA
Senator McCarthy warned our parents about a lot of things. The mainstream media, respected far beyond any deserving, told them that the Senator was a bloviating windbag in cheap off-the-rack suits, so they believed them. (They were right about the suits, but wrong about everything else.) The country was nearly lost when he gave his warnings, but it could have been saved at that point if the communists of the perfidious fourth estate (a.k.a. fifth column) had been less successful.
What I saw of higher education required that I take the value of primacy education finished in 1978, and give the college a firm grade of F. The author is spot on about the condition of higher education now. It is a dumbed-down bag of a hot air being passed out with ever increasingly cost by political idiots.
I will act one more thing. Several years I went into the library of Earlham College. I grew in town while it is located. Once, it was a excellent liberal arts college that would just about allow you into any university anywhere. Always interested past my years. I had experience using its library. Well – that library now has gutted its collection down to perhaps only a fourth of its size. It is an display visually of what has happened to America’s higher education.
One more thing – I knew an employee of that same library, and this was in the days when the first accounts of the killing fields in Cambodia were coming out. She stated to me if I had these stories, and find more to claim the stories from from the CIA. I told her that about the stories were true, and – she gave me the strangest look. I knew I had said the ‘wrong’ thing.
The destruction of higher education are done by fools like her.
The woke cultural Marxist doctrines will die out, they are the God that failed. The question is just how long they will last until people see they are false. It could be a long time. People still believe that Joe is a good person and good president, even though the facts are already available that he is a bad person and bad president. And people still think Che was good, even though we know he was not. Likewise, the other things as well. We can see they are false, but true believers do not give up so easily.
Having been there, done that….for the most part, should be required reading for every American.
I have college age kids. I did a lot of the work as a college counselor to them, trying to find schools that would be a good match. Both like great books (son read Machiavelli, son read How the West Won, daughter will minor in classics, including a year of Classical Greek).
Finding great books sequences was very hard. The alternative seems to be summer programs, for example Witherspoon in Princeton, Abigail Adams in Boston, U of Austin, etc. When I was a student at the University of Washington, there was a program called Comparative History of Ideas. It was on intellectual thought. Now the main focus of CHID appears to be disability studies.
A few programs that did stand out: Structured Liberal Education at Stanford (but capacity is limited to maybe 10% of the first year students), George Fox’s honors program, programs at Pepperdine and St Olaf, and a few others. It is very hard to evaluate programs from course catalogues and visiting a lot of campuses was not really feasible.
Did you consider Hillsdale College and Grove City College? St. John’s Annapolis or St. John’s Santa Fe? It’s been years so I don’t know what these colleges are today.
I tried very hard to get relatives to research colleges for their children. I told them to ask for the books assigned to key courses. Or sit in on a class. All they did was return and boast about the dormitories. I threw up my hands in disgust. Fortunately, two kids shrugged off the indoctrination and a third initially was captured but is halfway back.
Communists are as religiously zealous as Christians, maybe more so in the current context. (Holy)communion and commun(ism) are rooted in the same motivation- universal brotherhood. They differ only in the means to reach that goal.
Putnam: “…the professed long range political aim of the two major social forces of the day, which at once unite and divide mankind, Marxism and Christianity, is precisely the same. All Christians as well as Marxists must believe in communism as an article of faith. (and both finding it much harder to reach than they expected). They differ only in the tactics they regard essential to achieving it. Linkage of Syntax, Oct 3, 1966 pg 54
DIFFERENT TACTICS: Marxists use brute force to change minds: the hammer and sickle. Christians rely on the Cross: a personal and painful inner struggle for truth.
Are you going to argue that Christianity did NOT use FORCE and the threat of force to establish and maintain the Roman Catholic Theocracy for one-thousand years?
As only one but poignant example I will remid you of the lynching and dismemberment of the pagan philosopher and mathematician Hypatia by a mob of rabid Christians. Lynched BECAUSE she was a pagan daring to teach a pagan heresy. Mathematics historian Morris Kline wrote that the lynching of Hypatia marked the end of Greek mathematics in classical antiquity.
I will point out to you just one of many massacres of Christian heretics by other Christians, the massacre of 20,000 heretics at Beziers in 1209. Look it up….
And then when the Roman Catholic Theocracy was broken into competing Christian theocracies by the Protestant Reformation and the Counter Reformation those competing Christian theocracies did not wage bloody war agaisnt each other over orthodoxy, heresy, and blasphemy? And persecute, imprison, and kill their own members if they became heretics?
And don’t tell me, “Well, that was the Catholic Church, those were not REAL Christians, real Christians would never kill or persecute any one in the name of Christ, that’s not real Christianity”.
The theocracy of the Church of England persecuted the Puritans in the name of their TRUE Christianity. The Puritans left for America and no sooner did they land in America when they set up their own theocracy to persecute their own members, all in the name of their TRUE salvation.
Yeah, those Puritans were just so … like, ya know, puritanical. Hugh Hefner, the God, used that adjective so frequently, most Americans now regard him as a secular saint.
The Puritans weren’t all bad or good, like, ya know? I mean they did insist on conjugal marriage. In their day the nobility married for money, and everyone else emulated them. But then again, they were bad in that they were good, or uh … too good, er sumthin..
Honestly, do you imagine the Puritans invented ignorance? Well, they didn’t. Back then, the entire world was pig-ignorant, not just Christian religious fanatics who left another, larger group of religious fanatics.
Anyway, if Hugh Hefner is your idea of a person to be emulated, or he’s your paragon of virtuous living, enjoy your eternity in hell with him, Hitler, and all the other atheists and agnostics who thought the purpose of life is to just enjoy it.
Hugh Hefner? Where did I mention Hugh Hefner? Joy (an emotional consequence of happiness) and pleasure are not the same thing. Happiness and pleasure are NOT the same thing. Happiness in its rational, philosophical, identification means successful, rational, FLOURISHING.
“I am profoundly opposed to the philosophy of hedonism. Hedonism is the doctrine which holds that the good is whatever gives you pleasure and, therefore, pleasure is the standard of morality. Objectivism holds that the good must be defined by a rational standard of value, that pleasure is not a first cause, but only a consequence, that only the pleasure which proceeds from a rational value judgment can be regarded as moral, that pleasure, as such, is not a guide to action nor a standard of morality….
To say that pleasure should be the standard of morality simply means that whichever values you happen to have chosen, consciously or subconsciously, rationally or irrationally, are right and moral. This means that you are to be guided by chance feelings, emotions and whims, not by your mind. My philosophy is the opposite of hedonism. I hold that one cannot achieve happiness by random, arbitrary or subjective means. One can achieve happiness only on the basis of rational values. By rational values, I do not mean anything that a man may arbitrarily or blindly declare to be rational. It is the province of morality, of the science of ethics, to define for men what is a rational standard and what are the rational values to pursue.”
Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand
Playboy, March 1964
“Christianity’s War against the Mind – Aristotle Versus Religion” – Objectivist philosopher Andrew Bernstein
Talmudic learning, as meaningful and unwoke as you could imagine, is expanding worldwide. This January 2020 celebration of the completion of a daily study cycle filled MetLife Stadium in NJ, and other venues worldwide.
The Communists and Nazis couldn’t douse this flame, and neither can the current crop of cultural destroyers, whatever stupidity they try to mandate.
Jews have perscuted and killed Jews for heresy and blasphemy too. Jesus was a heretical, blasphemous, Jew he wasn’t exactly popular with orthodox Jews.
“Perhaps more to the point, the Maccabees were the Taliban of their day—slaughtering their more secular coreligionists as apostates and tolerating nothing but a strict adherence to fundamentalist religion.” – Andrew Bernstein
“The Birth of Monotheistic Religion – Aristotle Versus Religion”
No thx,
The exaltation of the physical and negation of the spiritual, even by your strongly intolerant, subjectivist false prophet “Ayn Rand”, should offend you, too. The Jewish Hellenists back in the day, like all good wokies, weren’t content to do their own thing on their own time, but enlisted government aid to uproot Judaism among its adherents, who didn’t take that lying down.
That despicable fiend Joe Biden along with other of the far left with their awful scheme to indoctrinated, as in brainwash impressionable young people in the American universities and colleges into the mindset of accepting and embracing the politically correct ideology and Islamic propaganda of multiculturalism under the guise of “education.”
It should be made clear the America and her school system was not founded of the horrendously evil and horrible junk as WOKE as well as multiculturalism along with as other nonsensical forms of PC philosophy including Marxism.
It’s back to the important things that children need to be taught in school .Which are reading writing and mathematics.
To put this in another way, school students would much better off studying economics based on the precepts of Adam Smith and the laws of motion by Isaac Newton instead of the worthless philosophy of WOKE and cultural relativity.
Dear Mr. Thorton, I wish my father was alive to read your thoughts and viewpoint on the abandonment of universities teaching of foundational skills only to be replaced with a ‘woke’ agenda that has corrupted the true events of history into an ideology belonging to a political party which seeks to control the minds of our children in elementary schools right up to our young adults enrolled in universities across our county.
My father passed away in 2015, he was an teacher, vice principal of a high school and principal of an elementary school. All located in the Northeast. I know he would be shocked to see how much the curriculum in schools has changed.
You present the most thought provoking points. Thank you for sharing this with us.
TY, Dr. Thornton, for another of your excellent posts. Your strong, clear voice is needed today more than ever. I retired several years ago after a 30-year academic career. I had he same experiences you had, and the same feelings about it. Bless you for all your good work.
It was not only Christians in England that were against slavery but so also were the Christians in Scotland and Wales.
The gentleman that wrote that famous song, Amazing Grace, about lifting your head high was a Scot.
The British Navy was built mainly in Glasgow Scotland.
If anybody wishes to take notice about which Gender and Race of humans that created, invented, and discovered the workings of what we all use in our daily lives then you may be surprised that very few were created, invented or discovered by females or men not of the Caucasian Race, however regardless of the actual FACT of my statement there are people who would consider such statements to be either sexist and racist, or both, therefore truth is now a lie in many peoples eyes and mind and this shows me just how far down the rabbit hole we have gone in the modern world today.
If people continue called me a supremacist then I have to believe they think I am indeed superior to them as they keep telling me so.
So what’s your point?
Communism, Nazism, and the very idea of race and racism, were all invented by individuals who were white. Does that make those evils a grand achievement? The ONLY antidote for racism is INDIVIDUALISM.
“A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin….
Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members….
The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred….
We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.” – Ayn Rand
If you return to college after retirement, as I’ve done, you will see that multiculturalism is far more dominant than critical thinking. Young (30s-50s) professors, especially women, have been so exposed to grievance dogma, that they probably don’t realize how much it shows to an old-timer (80) like me. There are constant jabs about toxic masculinity, suppression of women, racism — all of which have some truth. And, yes, we need to recognize our imperfect history. But these complaints only serve to create animosities, You cannot think clearly if identity becomes the primary focus of the curriculum.
Two lessons from 3/4 century of life: (1) Study mathematics so you know how to think. Study history so you know what to think about. (2) I thought it impossible, but even the physical sciences can be corrupted by “progressives.”
Only if you live under a rock do you not realize our education system has been corrupted as Thornton rightly points out. This is the design of the Marxists/Communists in charge. For decades they simply infiltrated quietly. Now the veneer is off the wood.
One of the biggest problems is the teachers unions – and all educator unions. The two largest teachers unions alone spent more than $80 million on radical candidates who go along with all of their demands. Students be damned.
Merit does not exist. They not only squeezed it out of faculty, they’re eliminating it for students. Dumbed down tests. Trophies for all… in the name of equity.
What we need:
1. Federal and State legislation requiring 85% of union due to go to member benefits.
2. End payroll deduction of union dues
3. Tie salary to performance: are kids scoring well in math, reading? What percentage of the class does? In college, what % of the kids are getting A or at least B?
We can start with a couple of clicks: tell lawmakers we want to take back education here:
https://alertamerica.news/take-action