Posted on 01/15/2007 1:45:53 PM PST by naturalman1975
Leftist notions have gradually filtered down from the universities to secondary education. This is exactly what the leftists have intended. Those who disagree with the Left will have to engineer their own "long march through the institutions".
By Kipling
Gods of the Copybook Headings
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will bum,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return.
Agree. Conservatives should insist on more pluralism in the selected readings. It would also help reach and engage those particular students who are inclined to prefer more positive reading materials. Not everyone is interested in reading cynical novels about how society is bad.
(another good conservative read.... )
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1807–1882
The Village Blacksmith
UNDER a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate'er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.
And children coming home from school
Look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge,
And hear the bellows roar,
And watch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor.
He goes on Sunday to the church,
And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears his daughter's voice,
Singing in the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.
It sounds to him like her mother's voice,
Singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;
And with his hard, rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.
Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night's repose.
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought!
I remember what a shock it was to read Ayn Rand. I was 33 and had never been exposed to any such thing. Once I'd read her, I realized how shocking it was to have obtained a B.A. in English without ever having read a single modern conservative writer.
The surrender of the Academy to the Marxist New Left in the 1960s has done everlasting damage to America. As one who vividly remembers the terrible ideological damage wrought by Hitler Youth and Stalin's Pioneers, it's hard to endure the similar brainwashing and political indoctrination of American kids. Make no mistake: those who engineered the coup and implement it now are every bit as totalitarian as the pair I mentioned.
Naturally Kipling and Service are looked down upon by departments of English -- but I've no doubt that if Homer or Shakespeare returned, they would prefer the manly storytellers with a sense of humor to all the navel-gazing twits spawned by the English departments.
Attention, kid studying poetry: Before you fall in love with a poet or with his/her views on life, take a careful look at a photo or a portrait of that poet. Sometimes, appearances do reveal a truth, and a picture is, sometimes, worth more than a thousand words. LOL
I think he meant "I had made a comment that IMPLIED...".
"Those who disagree with the Left will have to engineer their own "long march through the institutions"."
That's why I suggest more retirees with notable careers take classes at universities. Face it, we are life-long learners anyway so class work is more play than anything else. It's awfully nice to investigate those subjects one has not had time for in the past.
I had great fun in a political science class taught by a lefty made very nervous by my presence.
Astronomy was just straight science and math. ~No problems with the hard sciences...just the ones that masquerade as "science."
One of the great tragedies of literature is poetry became the official haunt of disgruntled lesbians, angry feminists, self loathing homosexuals, and angry race hustlers. As a result poetry died and is unlikely to be reborn. I think the illness began after WW2 and the emergence of the beat poets who trivialized the discipline of poetry. By the 70's any moron with a grudge called himself a poet.
Today poetry had fallen to such low state inner city drug dealers and gangbangers find as many rythmically acceptable ways to to say Moth#$%^@(*&! is considered poetry. Poetry is not only dead the carcass is rotting and smells to high heaven.
Shakespeare had a tremendous sense of humor!!
;-)
Just keep asking the professors the Right questions.
:-)
Oh, I agree with you that they are totalitarian. They're my contemporaries. I've seen them in action.
They are, after all, openly attempting to reshape society according to precepts that are not only unexamined but unexaminable. According to multiculturalists there is no point of view within a specific culture - especially Western - that is capable of examining a metaculture. It works the other way around and the other way around only.
I think that in the case of poetry especially this is a disastrously limited point of view. For one thing it cuts out a majority of the corpus of Western poetry from Homer through Pope, Marlowe, Arnold, Blake, Donne, Shakespeare, Byron, Burns, Browning, all of whom have been derided as both unpleasantly jingoistic and unpleasantly masculine, to Nesbitt and Kipling, who have been officially been declared non-persons. What is left isn't up to what is gone. When Walt Whitman is celebrated more for his reputed homosexuality than his subject material you know something is terribly wrong.
I had occasion to post a verse from Drake's Drum yesterday in another context and it occured to me that this is a poem that once every British schoolboy could recite and now that none has heard of. That is a sad comment on the new education.
And yet, real education consists not in teaching things, but in teaching how to learn and inculcating in the student a love of it. That may give the author of this piece some hope. One cannot expect ideologically-driven Education graduates to understand, much less communicate, a culture they have been conditioned to despise. But the most subversive thing all of us can do to overturn this stacked deck is to whisper to the kiddies that there's something a lot richer and more important out there only a library card away. Should the libraries fail, and they too are under assault, then Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 may have been prophetic.
You never read T.S. Eliot?
Plus he littered bodies across many a stage. Can there be any doubt that he would prefer The Cremation of Sam McGee to anything produced by the critically acclaimed nonentities of the last half-century?
He had something for everyone...and often in the same play.
:-)
Nope. Well, I read Eliot on my own but he certainly wasn't part of the canon they aimed at me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.