How A Generation Lost It's Common Culture

[middle-aged mom]

Originally Posted by Dockside

A fascinating essay from Minding the Campus -

"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."

How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture | Minding The Campus

It's a fast thoughtful read, and the Comments are good too.

How Socrates died remains a common debate in some circles.

At what point in history would most American people have been more aware of whom taught Plato?

[Kibby]

Originally Posted by randomparent

What disturbs me about the article is the assumption that his students should know all of this as eighteen-year-olds starting college. I did not read The Inferno or The Illiad until university, and even as a fifty-year-old with an established interest in history, I'm still struggling to grasp some of these topics. They are simply so vast. I could spend a lifetime and still barely scratch the surface. I'm appalled at his dismissiveness. As an educator, his role is to inspire students to explore the answers to these questions, not criticize them for not yet having it all figured out by age twenty. I'm reminded of one of my own history professors who like to refer to his lectures as "tossing pearls before swine." He was a condescending jerk, who sadly turned students off to history as worthy of study. The author strikes me as similarly obnoxious.

Dr. Deneen is not a history professor, has no degrees in history. He has a BA in ENGLISH lit and a PHD in Political Science. He has taught Government & Political Thought. His teaching and writing interests focus on the history of political thought, American political thought, religion and politics, and literature and politics. He is not talking about knowing facts, he is lamenting loss of critical thinking and apathy about everything that is not Me-Me-Me.

Dr. Deneen asks:
Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?

I've read them all, but didn't read The Inferno until College - read/studied all the rest in High School (along with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) in my English Classes. My children read/studied some of these in High School and my own collection from my High School Days in the summer. We used the Fitzgerald translations of Homer in High School - I had to go check my copy to see what translations. I should mention that I have 1961 translations & graduated from High School in the mid-1960's.

I had very poor History teachers in High School, but excellent English teachers -I didn't really understand it at the time, but they were teaching us how THINK, not just memorize facts/figures/dates.
By the time I was in college, I understood I had a wonderful grounding in Logic, thanks to a couple of High School teachers. I think of my own grandchildren as the Truffala seed and help them grow.

Is this a growing trend? Abolish Math Requirements
Wayne State University (WSU) in Detroit is one of the largest schools in Michigan, with some 27,000 students. Until now, all of them had to either take one of three basic math classes to earn their degree, or else test out by performing sufficiently on a relevant SAT, CLEP, or AP test.

But going forward, students will no longer have to demonstrate any mathematical competency to graduate, unless their particular course of study requires it.
Read more: College Drops Math Requirement, May Replace With Diversity | The Daily Caller

Interesting article from Dr Deneen - the comments after the article are also worthwhile. Thanks for posting.
At this point -- it too late for these Snowflakes to gain a Classical Education. The best THEY can "hope" for is the Exceptional Teacher who will/can nurture a love of learning. The best WE can "hope" for is for them to read Huxley & Orwell and be able to understand what they are reading. We can also "hope" they learn enough Math to recognize theft when it happens.

[InformedConsent]

Originally Posted by msgsing

It was all downhill after Candy Crush and the Kardashians.

It's been going down hill for decades. And it was intentional.

It's what happens when 50 years of public educators forcing an equal outcomes agenda in our country's public schools destroys generations of Americans' critical thinking skills.

"While students in the bottom quartile have shown slow but steady improvement since the 1960s, average test scores have nonetheless gone down, primarily because of the performance of those in the top quartile. This "highest cohort of achievers," Rudman writes, has shown "the greatest declines across a variety of subjects as well as across age-level groups." Analysts have also found "a substantial drop among those children in the middle range of achievement"

...The contrast was stark: schools that had "severely declining test scores" had "moved determinedly toward heterogeneous grouping" (that is, mixed students of differing ability levels in the same classes), while the "schools who have maintained good SAT scores" tended "to prefer homogeneous grouping [ability/skill-level grouping, aka tracking]."

If attaining educational excellence is this simple, why have these high-quality schools become so rare? The answer lies in the cultural ferment of the 1960s.

THE INCUBUS OF THE SIXTIES

In every conceivable fashion the reigning ethos of those times was hostile to excellence in education. Individual achievement fell under intense suspicion, as did attempts to maintain standards. Discriminating among students on the basis of ability or performance was branded "elitist." Educational gurus of the day called for essentially nonacademic schools, whose main purpose would be to build habits of social cooperation and equality rather than to train the mind."

The Other Crisis in American Education - The Atlantic

Much more at the link.

And the Washington Post article I linked on how millennials' intellectual and critical thinking skills are even worse than the generation's preceding them further shows what a colossal mistake dumbing down schools to try to "socially engineer" a "cooperative" society has been. Now, the general public is both dumb AND less cooperative. Inner-city crime rates, anyone?