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March 5, 2017

How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture

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. - - | Minding The Campus

Posted by gerardvanderleun at March 5, 2017 7:32 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.

Your Say

Good candidates for convenience store clerking and taxi driving if immigration is cut back.

Posted by: BillH at March 5, 2017 8:28 AM

I agree with Ann Barnhardt who said that the opposite of goodness is not evil but indifference.

Posted by: Denny at March 5, 2017 8:33 AM

It gets worse. Providence College Prof. Anthony Esolen describes what he and his peers are up against in “Exercises in Unreality: The Decline of Teaching Western Civilization.”

I now regularly meet students who have never heard the names of most English authors who lived before 1900. That includes Milton, Chaucer, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats. Poetry has been largely abandoned. Their knowledge of English grammar is spotty at best and often nonexistent. That is because grammar, as its own subject worthy of systematic study, has been abandoned. Those of my students who know some grammar took Latin in high school or were taught at home. The writing of most students is irreparable in the way that aphasia is. You cannot point to a sentence and say, simply, ‘Your verb here does not agree with your subject.’ That is not only because they do not understand the terms of the comment. It is also because many of their sentences will have no clear subject or verb to begin with. The students make grammatical errors for which there are no names.

Posted by: Donald Sensing at March 5, 2017 3:20 PM

Q: As it has been known for decades that the public indoctrination system is the worst thing this rotten assed gov't has ever done, why do parents continue to sentence their charges to 12+ years of imprisonment there?

A: The number 1 answer is "It was good enough for me and I turned out alright.", and the 2nd most common answer is, "I want my child to experience the social interaction with their peers.", even though they are well aware that association with idiots begats more idiots, but the real reason most kids are stored in the system each day is that it an easy access cost free day care center allowing the parents to absolve themselves of some responsibility and a place to lay scorn when they are victims of failure as on gov't can render.

Parenting is so easy but so hard so it's easy to understand why so many are eager to bail.

IOW, even 12 yo's can become parents but walking the walk requires 2 adult minds of opposite genders willing to commit and sacrifice and care.

The fantasy will continue until the beach crashes on the beach for it has no will of it's own.

Posted by: ghostsniper at March 5, 2017 8:27 PM

Should say:
The fantasy will continue until the WAVE crashes on the beach for it has no will of it's own.

Posted by: ghostsniper at March 6, 2017 4:16 AM

Our education system is the root cause of most of the problems afflicting society today. It needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Posted by: Gazoo at March 8, 2017 2:01 PM

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