George Rebane

I am a child, student, and defender of Western civilization.
 
Today I mourn.  Stanford JD Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute informs us all how ‘The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity’.  I mourn more deeply because it is at my alma mater where the coup de grace is being delivered.  UCLA has been the home of one of the nation’s flagship departments of English, but that has come to an end with a progressive and narcissistic turn of curriculum that today requires its majors to study not one whit of great English literature from the likes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton.  Instead, the students will now be exposed to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

MacDonald confirms that in present day humanities “the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferable his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.”  Displacing the classics will be the mandate that UCLA English majors instead will take three courses from the areas of –

–    Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies;
–    Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies;
–    Genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory;
–    Creative writing.

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What has been the distinguishing meter of western learning, giving rise to the most advanced cultures on earth, has been “this constant, sophisticated dialogue between past and present” that became “a defining feature of Western civilization, prompting the evolution of such radical ideas as constitutional government and giving birth to arts and architecture of polyphonic complexity.  And it became the primary mission of the universities to transmit knowledge of the past, as well … to serve as seedbeds for new knowledge.”

And today, as polarized “politics grow ever more unmoored from reality, humanist wisdom provides us with some consolation.  There is no greater lesson from the past than the intractability of human folly.”

On the other side of university campuses all across the country, schools teaching STEM majors will be seeing ever fewer American high school graduates who have been submitted to the new politically correct K-12 curriculum called Common Core.  Dr Sandra Stotsky, former member of Common Core’s Validation Committee, adds to the growing evidence that ‘Common Core Doesn’t Add Up to STEM Success’.

Stotsky argues that “students who study under these standards won’t receive anywhere near the quality of education that children in the US did even a few years ago.”  As for mathematics, the basis for all STEM learning, CC’s leading math standards writer Jason Zimba explained that the curriculum “is to provide students with mathematics to make them ready for a nonselective college – ‘not STEM’”. (emphasis mine)

Not wanting to put their government grant pipelines in jeopardy, heads of mathematics associations have duly fallen in line and endorsed a curriculum that clearly delivers a math-weakened body of graduates to our colleges and guarantees a declining enrollment in STEM majors.  Stotsky asks, “Why leaders of these organizations would endorse standards that will not prepare students for college majors in mathematics, science, engineering and mathematics-dependent fields is a puzzle. But no educational reform that leads to fewer engineers, scientists and doctors is worthy of the name.”

From this educational disaster in the making we segue to China – our global creditor, competing hegemon, second largest world economy, and fast becoming the foreign sovereign nation-state to own the most of American industries and employ the most American workers.  China has already eaten our breakfast, is now eating our lunch, and has eyes on our dinner.  If you want the current details on China’s ascendancy and the price we are paying for it, please read this piece by Michael Snyder (H/T to reader) that no media outlet (lamestream or otherwise) wants to broadcast.

Snyder details the major acquisitions China has made in American media, natural resources, agriculture, and manufacturing industries, not to mention technology companies with which it intends to soon become the dominant player in the big three of nanotechnology, genomics, and machine intelligence.  Snyder suggests that learning Mandarin would not be a bad idea for today’s younger generation.