The Rift Between the Finest Minds & The Limp Academics Now in Power
SPOILED AMERICANS, SOFT PROFESSORS & STUNTED STUDENTS
Sidney Hook, the dead white male philosopher, once told me over dinner how during his impoverished boyhood in Brooklyn he threw himself in the path of a streetcar to shake down the company for damage money.
Grim necessity defined that epoch: Our immigrant ancestors were driven by potato famines and pogroms to come to America and struggle, as Sidney did, for dignity, along with a certain “competency.” Grim necessity followed them not only onto farms and into factories, but into the teaching profession, where still in my early days, around World War II, I taught huge loads for miserable pay.
Almost all institutions reflected this austerity: Home discipline and the schools were far stricter and more demanding than they are today. But there was more joy, too, as old-timers vividly recall.
It was such necessity that helped keep most families together over lifetimes, along with affection, and made communities warmly close. Those communities maintained sustaining customs — the corner drugstore for decorous juvenile meeting between the sexes and village-square boxing matches for healthy male bonding. Normal folks — I mean those outside the academy — often wax nostalgic about all that, and I only rehearse these familiar facts to point up the dramatic contrast to post-Second World War America. No people in history have been so spoiled as Americans since the mid-1940s.
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Through the joys and perils of liberal learning we must ever recollect that only faith seeking understanding properly disposes the intellect toward conformity to Christ.
Forgotten is the teaching that by knowing truth, a student is freed — saved from drowning in a sea of unfulfilling “self-fulfillment.”
A “Humanities and Arts Memorial” was held at Stanford in 1995, as top universities worked to destroy Western culture.