We haven't encountered a worthy "Candidate for Best Essay of the Year" lately. Here, VDH makes a plea for a classical education in his essay in City Journal,
Humanities Move Off-Campus. One quote:
Over the last four decades, various philosophical and ideological strands united to contribute to the decline of classical education. A creeping vocationalism, for one, displaced much of the liberal arts curriculum in the crowded credit-hours of indebted students. Forfeiting classical learning in order to teach undergraduates a narrow skill (what the Greeks called a technę) was predicated on the shaky notion that undergraduate instruction in business or law would produce superior CEOs or lawyers—and would more successfully inculcate the arts of logic, reasoning, fact-based knowledge, and communication so necessary for professional success.
A therapeutic curriculum, which promised that counseling and proper social attitudes could mitigate such eternal obstacles to human happiness as racism, sexism, war, and poverty, likewise displaced more difficult classes in literature, language, philosophy, and political science. The therapeutic sensibility burdened the university with the task of ensuring that students felt adjusted and happy. And upon graduation, those students began to expect an equality of result rather than of opportunity from their society. Gone from university life was the larger tragic sense. Few students learned (or were reminded) that we come into this world with limitations that we must endure with dignity and courage rather than deal with easily through greater sensitivity, more laws, better technology, and sufficient capital.
My temptation is to quote the whole thing.
By coincidence, we read today via Insty that Harvard is scrapping The Canon. I'm like hip to that. Groovy, dude. How advanced! How Progressive! Let's do Maya Angelou and Sting and cool shit like that! Can you dig it?
Photo: Harvard College
