Posted on 03/02/2019 6:44:17 AM PST by Ge0ffrey
I only wanted to make four very brief points, but I felt compelled to state at the beginning that we could not abandon the ancient languages because then we would have nothing left of our field—of all the egregiously shocking things I had just heard, that seemed to be the one that most cried out to be challenged. I then attempted to say the following:
1) It is important to stand up for Classics as a discipline, and promote it as the political, literary, historical, philosophical, rhetorical, and artistic foundation of Western Civilization, and the basis of European history, tradition, culture, and religion. It gave us the concepts of liberty, equality, and democracy, which we should teach and promote. We should not apologize for our field;
2) It is important to go back to teaching undergraduates about the great classical authors—Cicero, the Athenian dramatists, Homer, Demosthenes, the Greek and Roman historians, Plato, and Aristotle—in English translation in introductory courses;
3) One way of promoting Classics is to offer more survey courses that cover many subject areas (epic, tragedy, comedy, rhetoric, philosophy, history, political theory, and art history), or to concentrate on one area such as in Freshmen seminars, or through western civilization classes;
4) It should help with securing funding from administrators to argue that such survey courses are highly cost-effective: a student could learn a tremendous amount even if such a survey were the only Classics course taken. On the other hand, a seminar that concentrated on the close reading of a few texts would prove beneficial for all students.
Unfortunately, I was interrupted in the middle of my first point by Sarah Bond, who forcefully insisted: “We are not Western Civilization!”
(Excerpt) Read more at quillette.com ...
Forget percentage. All of the colleges during colonial days were very small. All students learned classical philosophy. Each college had about 70 students. In today’s PhD philology program at Harvard there are only 70 students.
San Diego. What did she expect?
-PJ
Where are the solutions? Andy in the comments says, “We feel your pain and your words resonate with us. “
Your comment points to an obvious solution. All this crap will go away as the government money runs out, and these twerps will no longer be paid for doing the nothing that they spend their days doing.
Truly, as the economists say, what can't go on, won't go on. No one knows or cares who these academics are. No one benefits from what they do, except their landlords. Higher education is in the process of imploding because all but the biggest-name private colleges and important state schools are hemorrhaging enrollment. Students aren't applying--especially in the mediocre, government-dependent schools where these hateful academics teach.
The complete collapse of lower Higher Ed is going to happen because the big-spending states that prop up most of this bilge have overspent in every corner of their budgets. New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, for example, are all losing population and taxpayers, and are therefore facing monumental deficits. You heard New York's Governor Cuomo--a principle-free statist--admit, "We taxed the rich, and the rich left!" They lost the Amazon deal, too. He admitted they are billions of dollars short of the tax collections they need to pay the state's bills. I think he said state income was down by two-thirds just from people moving out.
This is happening right now. All that will be left is people who discover they really want or need to learn history, foreign languages, classics, literature, and religion, in addition to math and science, or else they won't get human nature itself, and will be less successful. It will take a few years or decades. But it will happen, because it's reality.
Don’t forget that at least the people of the ‘Dark Ages’ copied and preserved the works of ancient civilization.”
It wasn’t just random people, it was the Church.
This is the way the Left always works. The only history is now. There is no context. They live shouting down anyone who has a different opinion
This is what academe has become.
That's it. Mob rule tactics against perceived threats. Poisoning is next.
Thx for info...sad for “students” of today...their degrees in Propaganda are near worthless
I suspect that what it really boils down to is this: only a small percentage of any population is intellectually capable of this sort of study. The vast majority of people want jobs that involve a skill (one that doesn't require deep thought) and make money. For entertainment, they want games, sex, and stimulants. That's why they were always called "the masses."
We should ask ourselves, what kind of liberal arts education (general education) is beneficial to the vast majority of people? Whatever the answer to that, it all belongs in K-12.
The “classics”can’t be relevant.They were not produced by women of color or by Moslems even.And they are all more than a generation old.
I went to a classics college which gave me a modified version of what our Founders had. I was taught to appreciate Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Cicero, etc.
Kids have enough smarts to learn the classics, they are just not being introduced to it, for the same reasons the professor was so rudely treated at the conference.
One of the reasons seemingly so few take up the classics is because not everyone plans a life of diligent research in classical philosophy.
Our Founders were trained to understand the human person by way of virtue and vice. That is moral philosophy. They got that training because at the time it was important for the colonies to train for good preachers and good judges. Both of those professions required that they understand the human soul so they could guide it or judge it.
My daughter got a minor in classics at Hillsdale. She was introduced to it throughout her schooling and she took a lot of Latin.
I’m not sure why liberals would be against Rome which had a policy of incorporating the whole world into the Empire; had Universal citizenship for all free men; was very multicultural; banned Christianity for centuries; had welfare programs for the poor; subsidized sports and entertainment which kept the citizens content and had an absolutist central government. Tell them this and they would probably support it. LOL
Bond bemoaned the fact that her blog posts did not count towards tenure...Let that sink in. This snowflakes thinks blogging should lead to untouchable employment.
... even though, puzzlingly, she has tenure, or so she told us.If Academic Nitwittery is ensconced in the Classics, it's from such baboonery.
See #56
You've hit on something that I've been saying, not so much in relation to academe, about this gender dysfunction we've been agape at of late. Bathrooms, locker rooms, choosing a different gender every day, boys dominating girls' athletics, etc., all being called into question and the powers that be going along with it. There are massive unintended consequence, not least of which is the threat of invasion of women's privacy. Men might not care so much for that kind of privacy; but women do.
On and on it goes. But, one fine day, people will look up (I don't know whether sooner or later) and say, "Who did this to us? None of this is real; it's all made up; we've been had."
We don’t need no Western Civilization comrade.
Or teach at a conservative Catholic college. Plenty of students for her there.
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