Whenever I hear it said that people are ceasing to [be] told about something tremendously important at school – like history, classical music, foreign languages, Latin and Greek, ancient history, etc. – I react with the suspicion that, far from this presaging oblivion for this or that discipline or body of knowledge, for something to be ignored at school is a prelude for a significant if not huge revival of popular interest in the thing.
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Hell, heck, I sure hope he’s right.
The point of a good liberal education is not to present an exhaustive examination of every subject, but to whet the appetite by exposing the student to significant, fundamental elements of the subjects which compose the foundation blocks of a classical, comprehensive education.
Our school system manages to do none of this, while boring the bejesus out of most of the students, and driving any interest and continuing curiosity right out of them.
Are there exceptions to this sweeping condemnation? Of course. Thank the heavens, there are schools which still teach, and students whose desire to learn and explore the life of the mind cannot be quenched or turned aside.
But for far too many, their experience in the school system is years of tortuous boredom and meaningless drivel, uninspiring and unenlightening, whose end result is an actual antipathy for learning. An aching need to know and understand remains, but that is often the impetus to delve into spiritualism, exotic philosophies, and nonsense conspiracy theories, all dressed up as meaningful, explanatory ideas, which are only able to impress those who were never schooled in logical thinking and coherent intellectual strategies to begin with.
It is natural for humans to hunger for knowledge. What is unnatural is to substitute dumbed down, PC, multi-culti gibberish, wrapped up in a non-critical, self-esteem package, and pretend that this glop is the equivalent of a solidly constructed, rigorous classical education.
It is cotton candy masquerading as meat and vegetables. And it is every bit as disastrously abusive, in an intellectual and moral sense, as feeding the former to a hungry child and claiming to have provided a balanced diet.