The Collapse of Classical Education
A tremendous article by Victor Davis Hanson that laments the amazing decline of the university. Essentially, classical study is now eclipsed by faddish, postmodernism. It embraces a "therapeutic" way of looking at the world rather than the appropriate lens of tragedy.
Below I pulled several key sections, but one should really read this full article to gain an appreciation for it. In many ways it is like Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (though obviously much shorter and much less detailed). I would hope the warning signs are heeded.
"The decline of a classical core in the university also meant that the tragic view was eclipsed by the therapeutic."
"in the new therapeutic mindset, human nature is not, as Thucydides insisted, fixed, but capable of being altered and “improved” in the university by the requisite money, learning, and proper attitude: early death, personal setback, and social unfairness are not innate to the human condition and sometimes to be borne over the generations with courage in the manner of Oedipus or Antigone, but are rather the result of those with power whose necessary dethronement might guarantee a life without such tragedies. Peace and conflict resolution theory classes, not Thucydides and Herodotus, can teach us more about war, since an improved human nature understands that conflict is not caused by evil intent, honor, pride, or fear, and so checked by vigilance, preparedness, and deterrence. Instead the cause of war is the absence of proper counseling, or of money and empathy that might have otherwise prevented genuine miscommunications and misunderstandings between like parties with similar desires for peace. Xerxes, Pericles, Epaminondas, Agesilaos, Alexander — none of these leaders who went to war quite knew what he was doing, and might have prevented the deaths of thousands had he talked with, rather than over, his adversaries."
"The triumph of the therapeutic and the eclipse of the tragic ensured that students’ expectations soared even as their intellectual and mental abilities to handle inevitable setbacks eroded. The result was a weird marriage in both today’s student and professor of arrogance and ignorance — assurance that bad things either won’t happen or can be easily addressed by identifying the right -ism or -ology, but utter confusion when that never seems quite to be the case."
"In conclusion, we can assess the value of classical learning in the life of the university by illustrating how non-Hellenic are the contemporary university agendas of popular culture, therapy, political correctness, and vocationalism. The Greeks remind us that there are rules to acquiring knowledge not found on the street, that the world is not always a happy place, and that we must prepare for a Hobbesian life that is sometimes solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, that our allegiance must be to truth, not to the prevailing politics and fads of the days, and that if we can read, write, and think well, we can do anything — and if not, nothing really at all."
"We, in contrast, have lost all sense of proportion and simply use the self-absorbed yardstick of our own times versus all others. Thus Iraq — not the summer of 1864 or December 1950 — is the worst (fill in the blanks) war, blunder, or quagmire in our history or of all time. A flippant campus slur is the most sexist thing ever heard, as if the frontier woman on the Colorado plains without electricity and with eleven sick children never had it as rough. Wounded Knee is tantamount to Okinawa, the loyalty oaths of the 1950s commensurate to the Inquisition. And why not, when the purpose of education now is not to train young minds in a method of disinterested inquiry supported by historical exempla, but to condition them to think in preordained, deductive fashion — in other words, as Sophists rather than Socratics?"
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