LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
I gather. I haven’t heard any direct reports. While I enjoy embarrassing my kids as much as the next dad, I’ve never gone so far as to ask them, “What did you learn in Sex Ed Class today?”) The students have absorbed endless lessons about the horrors of war but would be baffled if they encountered the quotation, “make a desolation and call it peace.” Not that they’re likely to be assigned to read Tacitus. “ Instead they are assigned to read about the detrimental effects of Eurocentric patriarchal imperialism. What they read is true enough, no doubt. But if an instructor dared to assign “The White Man’s Burden,” in which Rudyard Kipling writes about the detrimental effects of Eurocentric patriarchal imperialism on Eurocentric patriarchal imperialists, the instructor would be fired. And, come to think of it, I don’t believe any of my children have ever been assigned to read a poem that rhymed. Furthermore – while I’m at it with my rant – today’s students know all about climate change but spend too much time indoors staring at screens to know anything about the weather. They have reversed Charles Dudley Warner’s famous quip, “Everybody complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” They’re all doing something about the I give them two rules: Mind your own business and keep your hands to yourself.
A young man can appear in the classroom dressed like Princess Di and no one will say a word, but he will be sent back to his dorm if he wears jeans and a collarless shirt. I asked my daughter, “Is there bias at your school?” She said, “Oh, gosh no. Nobody’s prejudiced or bigoted or anything like that.” “In that case,” I said, “why not just have ‘Unconscious Day’?” Schools haven’t taught my kids many bad things. On the other hand, there are many good things schools haven’t taught my kids either. Today’s students can list every injustice in America but can’t name a Justice of the Supreme Court. They know all about Martin Luther King Jr. but have no idea who Martin Luther was. They are fully conversant with Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, but are fuzzy on the details of Articles I through VII of the U.S. Constitution... not to mention Amendments I through X, and II in particular. (Furthermore, Title IX aside, they don’t know their Roman numerals and they can’t write – or read – longhand.) They are cognizant of the origins of poverty but ignorant of the origins of wealth. Their instruction has been in “dark Satanic Mills,” not John Stuart Mill. And they wouldn’t know Adam Smith from Adam. (And even knowing Adam from Eve is a pedagogical conundrum these days. Or so
8 May 2018
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