This is the refuse of public school education, which is the model for most private schools. No classics (maybe the Cliff Notes version), simplified musical and artistic tastes (I mean look at all the “junk” art littering our cities - no meaning, no context and obviously the result of a disturbed mind (I knew a master glass blower in college whose work, a single plate or goblet, sold for five thousand dollars or more. After a short while and plenty of drugs he turned to making shadow boxes filled with dirt and garbage and competely gave up glass blowing)), dumbed down teachers and lessons.
Homeschoolers are such a small minority. The only way I can see stemming this is forums like this were people learn basic economic truths and share them with others. Once you have to earn your own bread reality sinks in quickly.
If we become European in our outlook and how we treat failure, and we are getting super close, it is the end of it. We might even be there, but it sounds too pessimistic to say.
Great post.
I agree that passing over the classics is key to all of this. Why are the “dead white European male” classics dismissed in favor of more modern works? Because they’re DIFFICULT. The classics of the past taught tough, important lessons but equally important is that they are used to teach careful reading, thinking about what is going into one’s head. They are not full of cues that tell the reader how to react, what is the “right” way to respond. Now look at the victim literature so popular in schools now, where the victim is enshrined, and the achiever is made the villain, the exploiter, as opposed to the achiever being the one who moves the world, defends the helpless (as opposed to the lazy).
(I work as a counselor in a high school, btw, so I know what I am talking about—a student recently graduated and is now in college for creative writing; he informed his parents he learned more about writing and literature from me than from his creative writing teacher.)
Reading is the foundation for all learning. If I could do one thing for a kid, it would be teach him to love reading—something that can only be done BY someone who loves reading.
It really does boil down to that. If you teach a child to love reading, he will learn.
If you teach him to watch the tube and play video games...he won’t learn.