The Middle Way, Part 9 (Education)

For those wondering why education is so bad in the United States, Marinoff has a few ideas, all of which I agree with. Let us do an overview of what Marinoff has to say about education.

“The West’s greatest minds have been nourished, stimulated, and inspired by Euclid’s Elements, which (among other invaluable treasures) have been jettisoned by postmodernism. Not many university administrators, professors, or students still know the motto that Plato affixed above the entrance of his Academy, the model of our universities themselves: LET NO ONE IGNORNT OF GEOMETRY ENTER HERE. What would Plato or Aristotle say about an education system that is all but bereft of geometry, in which students gauge mainly their “self-esteem”? I leave it to your imagination for now. But I will take no chances, and will return to it later. Suffice it to say that the motto has been changed to: LET NO ONE COGNIZANT OF GEOMETRY GRADUATE HERE” (135).

I have a MA in English and a Ph.D. in the Humanities. Let me give you a list of the works I did not read while getting my undergraduate and graduate education (and which I have had to read on my own): The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Beowulf, Metamorphoses, any of Shakespeare but the tragedies, anything on the Arthurian legend, anything on the Faust legend . . . pretty much the reading list I made in my posting below about setting up a university. And even though I had taken many poetry writing classes, it wasn’t until I took poetry writing with Frederick Turner that I was made to read the Romantic poets or to write in any sort of form. Yes, even poetry needs GEOMETRY!

I have also had the misfortune of teaching the results of our focus on self-esteem. The result? An almost complete inability to take criticism. Now, it seems to me that the ability to take criticism is a sign that you have good self-esteem. So either this approach does not work, or they are not actually trying to teach students to have self-esteem. All they are teaching them to do is be weak. Marinoff explains the consequences:

“It’s a grand irony: Euclid’s Elements was the only prerequisite for entry into the West’s first and foremost Academy, because an understanding of geometry vouchsafed a foundation for understanding everything else, from poetry to physics, from philosophy to politics. By the late twentieth century, too many Western universities had not only abandoned Euclid as a prerequisite, but also eliminated prerequisites themselves. The result is inevitable: Their graduates’ horizons are narrowed instead of broadened. And so the intellectual edifice of Western civilization is imploding . . . . A dumbed-down and deconstructed mind politic cannot long sustain the vital functions of its body politic” (136).

The neo-Marxists who set this situation up know this. They know that only an ignorant population can be controlled. That is why they are working to make sure we are all ignorant. You don’t believe me? Marinoff points out that,

“the American professorate is 95 percent radical liberal, and the 5 percent who profess other views – even moderate, libertarian, or conservative, let alone extreme rightist – are gagged, censored, and persecuted by totalitarian university administrators that have as little regard for the Bill of Rights as did apologists or slavery in the antebellum South” (192).

Amen. Preach it brother!

The situation at the universities trickles down to lower education. Now here is an insight I think needs to be made more fully understood – we sometimes get cause and effect backwards (as Nietzsche once wisely observed), and I too was guilty of this until Marionff made it clear:

“As university education became a “right” to be conferred by quotas instead of privilege earned by scholarly achievement, the K-12 system also lost its incentive to educate. As the Russians say, “A fish rots from the head down.” And so the American educational system has rotted” (202).

Here was the problem made abundantly clear. I saw it all around me, and blamed it on the lower grades rather than on the universities. If universities returned to being a place where you earned what you got by scholarly achievement, how much better would the high schools become? Do you think middle classed moms would put up with their children not being able to get into a university because of the poor education their children were receiving in their middle and high schools? High standards in the universities would cause parents to demand high standards – while right now most parents think it’s other schools that are the problem, not theirs. They have to be made to see that it is their schools that are failing. Revolutionary transformation in the universities is the only way to do that.

What we need to do then is identify the problem: “the profane sacrilegious left, epitomized by the deconstructed zombies mass-produced on and graduated from the assembly lines of postmodernism’s totalitarian factories – the universities” (208). Groups who deny reality itself, and teach students that Western civilization and all its knowledge are bad, and that any story is as good as another (see my posting below on Saudi Arabia punishing a rape victim).

“The effects of deconstruction are pervasive and pernicious [in our universities]. It is not a coincidence that American students are performing increasingly poorly, by international standards, in mathematics and sciences, and not a coincidence that America is losing her global lead in sciences and technologies alike.. These cultural strengths of the West have been sapped by the cancer of deconstructionism” (241).

This same deconstructionism has turned our students into functional illiterates, unable to put together a grammatical sentence on paper. There have been moves against “normalizing” in writing, meaning anything goes. But if you cannot write clearly, you cannot think about anything clearly – but it is muddled thinking that the postmodernists want to push on our students.

Our universities “should be committed to discussing, researching, and clarifying issues, to testing hypotheses and discovering scientific truths, instead of censoring politically incorrect questions and promulgating politically correct ideologies” (294).

And education reform should not just occur at the universities:

“The best overall education involves a partnership between parents and schools. Parents are primarily responsible for their children’s cognitive development and good study habits, while schools are primarily responsible for curriculum and content, as well as for reinforcing good academic and social habits alike. Countries like Japan are educationally successful because both partners are expected to assume responsibility for their child’s learning; countries like the United States are in educational free fall because often both partners eschew that responsibility” (332).

Thus, the parents have to be responsible for their child’s education. We too easily put everything on the government, like it is the government’s responsibility to educate (and, increasingly, feed, discipline, and provide health care for) our children. Some of this involves the kinds of perverse incentives provided by our universities, but some of it is entirely on the shoulders of parents. Marinoff observes that the Jesuits said, “Give us the child until the age of seven, and we will answer for the man.”

I love that quote. It should be plastered on billboards around the U.S., with something emphasizing that all parents who have their children to the age of seven DO answer for the man, or woman. They are the ones responsible for how their children turned out. Marinoff points out that

“Indeed, the first seven years of life are critical. A child will be strongly influenced, emotionally and intellectually, by the values and prejudices instilled in him or her during this period. The music they hear at this point in their life remains most faithfully in long-term auditory memory; emotional attachments to religious or mythical beliefs ingrained during this period last a lifetime” (332).

Marinoff has much more to say about education, as do I, but let us leave it here for now. There is much work to be done if we are going to fix education. Are you ready to do something?