This blog is about tranquilizing our students through indoctrination: a kind of lobotomy of the imagination.
The Wall Street Journal, stomping grounds of the moderate men, features a “counter-cultural” summer reading list for high school kids in its May 30, 2015 edition (page A-13), clearly intended to cool out extremists of every stripe. Meet the author here: http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2004/09/01/textbooks-where-curriculum-meets-child-exclusive-interview-gilbert-t-sewall (preceded last week by Peggy Noonan’s http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trigger-happy-generation-1432245600).
Sewall advertises himself as a (sort of) conservative who opposes the radicalism of “multiculturalism” and “diversity”, going back to the “classics” with a small dollop of works likely to instill pride in (tempered) American individualism.
I suspect that Sewall’s agenda fits in all too snugly with earlier “moderates” whose project was to tame autodidacts, i.e., the barbarian hordes likely, through empiricism, science, and technology, to overthrow traditional elites. I have written about their efforts before on this website:
https://clarespark.com/2010/06/15/the-classics-as-antidote-to-science-education/, https://clarespark.com/2009/09/23/progressives-and-the-teaching-of-american-literature/, and https://clarespark.com/2010/06/19/committee-for-economic-development-and-its-sociologists/.
Who are the enemy to the moderate men? Nietzsche, in his inimitable fashion, points the way in his first book (The Birth of Tragedy):
[Nietzsche:] Nothing can be more terrible than a barbaric slave class that has learned to view its existence as an injustice and preparing to avenge not only its own wrongs but those of all previous generations. Under such conditions, who would dare appeal confidently to our weary and etiolated religions, which have long since become “Brahmin” religions?” Myth, the prerequisite of all religion, has been paralyzed everywhere, and theology has been invaded by that optimistic spirit which I have just stigmatized as the baneful virus of society. [Compare to my next blog that quotes FN on “the Jews”: https://clarespark.com/2015/05/31/nietzsche-on-the-jews-and-non-aryan-christians/%5D
Spiritualized Nietzsche imagined by Juan Pablo Hern
[Clare, cont.] So it is not surprising to see Voltaire’s Candide (with its counter Enlightenment-optimism message) on Sewall’s reading list.
What is missing from all these paeans to the classics? To be sure, they may be wonderful to read, but the biographies and sociopolitical commitments of the authors are all missing. Hence we can revel in the images and eloquence of the authors, but we have no idea of the deeper meanings of the texts, nor how incompatible social movements have appropriated them to twist their meanings.
That is the problem with the all of the humanities as taught today by either multicultural leftists or by the organic conservatives who called themselves “moderates” and have explicitly sought to enhance “social cohesion,” political stability, as achieved through the golden mean. (On the intentions of the New Critics see https://clarespark.com/2009/11/22/on-literariness-and-the-ethical-state/.)
Without rigorous training in history, political theory, and economics, youngsters of college age are left without a beacon to light their way through these classic texts, however meritorious and appealing they may be as high cultural artifacts.
And even more likely, the poor preparation for reading anything at all with even a shallow understanding in our dumbed down, pseudo-civilization, suggests that a humanities education at any age is a waste of time and money.
The Clare Spark Blog 
[…] as a strategy to attain “common ground” and to resolve what may be irreconcilable conflicts. https://clarespark.com/2015/05/30/constructing-the-moderate-men-with-the-classics/, https://clarespark.com/2010/11/06/moderate-men-falling-down/, […]
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