Over on Facebook, Firehand linked to an excellent essay by Patrick Deneen, “David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies at Notre Dame.” Professor Deneen begins his piece How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture:
My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.
I would argue that many have been taught to actively hate their own culture, but the majority? As Elie Wiesel once observed:
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
I strongly recommend you read Professor Deneen’s entire essay, but here’s the money shot:
Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctable outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide.
(Bold emphasis mine.) Which is why I’ve been saying for years that the only thing that can save education is to take off and nuke the current system from orbit until the rubble bounces.
But I’m pretty sure it’s too late for that.