How Academia Dismantled Our Culture

How Academia Dismantled Our Culture
In pursuit of the truth - cinops be gone - Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2012

Selected excerpts from the book by David Gelernter, “America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture” in the issue of “First Things” - February, 2013

“At first sight, David Gelernter’s book tells the same story as Roger Kimball’s, “Tenured Radicals.” Students have never “heard anything good about Western Civilization, America, Judaism, Christianity, white, males.” Their teachers sneer at patriotism and deride religious faith. “In modern America, the left gets its way not by convincing people but by indoctrinating their children.”….

“Yes, higher education holds firmly and righteously to the left-liberal ideology, but the education of students in it is a superficial affair. Yes, young Americans experience a system that peddles left-liberalism as truth and justice, the only fitting and proper way to think and believe. But four years of instruction in theories of sexuality, race, gender, social justice, and American power haven’t made them into active and informed partisans.
“It has made them thoughtlessly partisan, complacently accepting liberal notions in spite of one contrary fact after another (interest rates under Carter, the collapse of communism, the hazards of single parenting, etc.).

“Professors don’t so much teach left-liberal ideas as assume them and have students do the same. Higher education has not produced committed radicals ready to spout Marx, collect historical evidence, and craft vigorous arguments against capitalism, patriotism, religion, and family. It has produced blithe adults who imbibe the left-liberal cocktail and go about their business.
“The first generation of professor-intellectuals learned from their elders’ cultural traditions and historical knowledge , which they then denounced. But when it came time for them to be elders, they skipped the traditions and went straight into denunciation, though in casual, watery form.

“Their students don’t think hard and long about slavery, Hiroshima, and Vietnam - they just know that the U.S. is guilty. They don’t inquire deeply into Christianity - they just know that it oppresses women….
“No one, Gelernter argues, embodies the “Airhead generation” and the “PORGIs” (“post-religious globalist intellectuals”) better than Barack Obama, a man who grew up in a whirlwind of locales, attended elite colleges, and now speaks in passionate but largely hollow terms about justice, equality, and community. “All former leftist movements were driven by ideology,” Gelernter says, “but “Obama’s is driven by ignorance.”

“Paradoxically, however, the superficiality of left-liberal learning makes it more effective. If too many students came out of college outspokenly ideological, outsiders would object. The softer version allows them to overlook it. Many people acknowledge the tendentious, extremist, or downright crackpot quality of the professoriate, but they believe that most students roll their eyes at the wacky ideas and stilted jargon, play the game, get their grades, and move on to sensible things.
“True, Gelernter agrees, but only in part. Enough left-liberalism survives as attitude and assumption among graduates for to wreak havoc upon American society. [Look what happened in the 2012 Presidential elections.] The instruction lives on as reflexive notions, not discursive thoughts. Instead of being a dynamic site of revolutionary change, the campus is a hidebound setting where stale and discredited ideas endure.

“The situation is too settled and intractable for Gelernter to offer any other prescription than withdrawal. The university belongs to the left-liberals, [No!) and instead of trying to take the campus away from them, we should take away from them our children’s learning.
“Focus on internet education!” he urges, promoting the “neutral or mildly right-leaning” instruction provided by numerous online elementary schools and colleges. If we patronize them, the older American traditions will not only influence our children, they will triumph, he concluded….”



George H. Kubeck - How would the Founding Fathers deal with progressive education and indoctrination? How would St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Dominic dismantle progressive education?