Next Generation: Victor Davis Hanson on the Decline of American Education (Video)
"You could lose civilization in one generation if that expertise and methodology is not handed down..."
February 9, 2013 - 12:20 am
Click to watch at PJTV.
Author Victor Davis Hanson joins Col. Allen B. West to discuss the decline of classics and American education. Have the skills of deduction and induction been replaced by political ideologies? Is it too late to save American education? Could the American civilization disappear in a generation? Find out.
As usual, Victor Hanson hits it on the head. Liberals take what they want from history and leave the rest. For example, to a liberal, the Northwest Ordinance never happened and they don’t want to hear about it.
No culture can survive which does that. Pragmatism in America is dying in favor of an ideologically fueled world view that emphasizes making history’s losers feel good about themselves and history’s winners guilty criminals.
Try applying that same type of thinking to fixing a car and you’ll be driving a bicycle. Guess what? We’re driving bicycles.
Excellent summation.
I’m often reminded of the line from the movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – ‘I Weep For the Future’.
Me too..
At the risk of looking stupid, what does a liberal gain by pretending that the Northwest Ordinance never happened?
Read the liberal press, especially the black press. The view that America was built on slavery, for example, is common.
Yet there was never any slavery in Minnesota, for example, thanks to the Northwest Ordinance. There were anti-Jim Crow laws in MN long before the year 1900.
There is a statue in Duluth, a city that recently had a “white privilege” billboard campaign, of 3 black men lynched there in 1920. According to the black Tuskegee Institute, from 1882 to 1968, 9 men were lynched in MN, 5 white, 4 black.
Oregon is in America. It was not built on slavery. Wyoming is in America. It was not built on slavery.
The Massachusetts state constitution is de jure anti-slavery and it dates from 1780.
Extrapolate this all out in multiples.
The Left takes what it wants from history, and leaves the rest.
Thanks, I see your point.
Think of it, the man who doesn’t care what you think will be king, needing no other virtues and qualities for that office. Just like the proverbial one-eyed man in the land of the blind. I don’t think we would really want this, but it is what we’ll get…..
The dumbing down of education is even more pronounced over here in Europe.
But the staggering thing is not the ignorance of the badly educated, but how dumb the smart people are.
The poor state of our education is not confined to our ghettos, but extends to our elite universities.
See a great analysis of both smart and dumb ignorance in: “Don’t Push It!” at:
http://john-moloney.blogspot.com/
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” –A Nation at Risk, 1983
In 1990, after a 25 year career in business, I decided to enter the ranks of teaching. I taught high school history. Prior to 1990, the last time I had been in a high school classroom was when I had been a high school student 28 years before. I was shocked by what I encountered. I asked my students to write an essay as part of an exam I had given. I could not believe what they submitted. Three hundred word run-on sentences, no capitalization or punctuation of any kind, and no thought organization. When I showed these “essays” to a couple of my fellow teachers, they replied that this was the result of “outcomes-based education.” This is a system where the student is rewarded “for his/her effort.” It does not matter if the results are correct or not. This philosophy is still in place in many public education systems. Is it any wonder why we are at the nadir of education today?
I believe it was Glenn Seaborg who said that if an outside country imposed an education as dysfunctional as what we have today, that it would be considered an act of war. He said this in 1983.
Every day I read an article or hear a story that makes me glad I am homeschooling. I have already learned so much that was neglected in my own education. History has become my favorite subject. As I look back, perhaps I was saved by my predeliction towards math and science. I graduated without much real knowledge of history or philosophy, but I missed out on the political indoctrination as well.
I am so thankful my wife and I were able to afford private education, K-12, for both daughters. Other than two loving parents raising the girls the way we taught and providing a stable home, it was the greatest gift we could give our kids.
Public teachers have many of the same problems I have encountered dealing with nurses. Good ones are not going to tolerate the crap forever and while there are still pockets of good public educational systems, I am finding them becoming more rare by the day. Same with good nurses. We don’t have a shortage of nurses. We have a shortage of good nurses willing to nurse anymore. Many have left the profession out of frustration and lack of support.
The only way to fix public education is to break the system and start over, IMO. Education needs to be changed from the ground up.
And I don’t think that is possible anymore. Because if there is anything America has an abundance of, it’s really bad parents. At least two generations now and it shows.
I was talking to a few Middle School kids the other day as part of a conference at our local school. These girls stunned me. We were talking about their history (sorry, they call it “social studies”) class and they were frustrated because they were learning about the War of 1812. Both of these girls bleated out, “Who cares about the War of 1812, what does that have to do with anything and what do I need to know that for in life?”
Tears almost came to my eyes. Why do we need to know about the War of 1812? Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s because a foreign country actually invaded the United States and burned our capital? Maybe it’s becaue we almost lost that war, along with our new-found independence? Maybe because it showed that when you’re unprepared to fight a major war, you could almost lose it and with it your country? Or maybe it’s because it’s an object lesson on how average Americans, like Dolly Madison, could rise up in a crisis and make valuable contributions to the war effort (Dolly actually SAVED copies of the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence before the British invaded Washington and burned it to the ground)? And let’s not even talk about people like Andrew Jackson and Oliver Hazard Perry, men who while facing enormous odds stood up and faced danger and emerged victorious?
I told these girls that if they don’t know about our past they will have absolutely no hope of shaping our future. The rights and the heritage that were fought for over the years was handed to them on a silver plate and it is NOT their right to just throw that away. It is their responsibility to learn it, value it, to cherish it, and pass it on to future generations of Americans. These rights and our magnificent heritage are the very reasons why we ARE Americans and don’t live in some medieval society like Saudi Arabia. We ARE better than most nations on this planet and to understand why that is you have to study the past. You have to learn it, appreciate it, and embrace it. Only then will you be able to understand why things like the Second Amendment are so important to people in this nation, regardless of what the elites may think in Washington.
We have been given a special trust by the people who came before us. We have a responsibility to show this generation why there was a Civil War, why there was such a fierce fight over slavery, and the amazing story of how a bunch of farmers and sailors defeated the greatest military power on this planet, Great Britain. We have to let them know about the genius possessed by the Founding Fathers in simply inventing documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, rights that we still possess to this day (until they are taken away from us by power-hungry individuals in Washington). And we also have to remind kids today that there indeed was a war BEFORE World War II, which was called World War I, and that the mistakes made by the victors of that war only lead to a greater disaster just a few years later. How many kids today even KNOW that we even fought in something called World War I, let alone why it was fought and how it started?
THIS is how you learn about history, why kids should value it and find it important. THIS is why we should be getting rid of crap like “gender studies” and go back to the basics of American history. Computer science may be all well and good, but if you don’t have a stable nation in which to exercise your knowledge of computer science, then what is the point in having it? And when you sit there and wonder where all our rights have gone and why Washington now dictates almost every aspect of your life, you really need to know all the warnings our Founding Fathers gave us on tyranny and the dangers of an all too powerful Federal government. If kids don’t learn this today, then they shouldn’t complain when they wake up one day and find out that they’re no better than the Europeans, who are weak, morally clueless, cowards, selfish, childish, and think that government has the right to run every aspect of your life and that individual freedom is a joke and that all government is good so long as somebody else gets stuck with the bill for paying it. Is THAT what we want to hand down to future generations of Americans? I certainly do not.
I just noticed I misspelled Dolley Madison’s name? How shameful of me. It is spelled “Dolley,” not “Dolly.” Show you that you shouldn’t start typing before you have your morning coffee!
it’s Dolly
The U.S> was the aggressor in 1812. The war only turned defensive because of the incompetence of our attacking generals.
Um, at least one of the issues had been ongoing long before the first shots were fired. That was, that British ships were stopping Americans and kidnapping sailors for involuntary servitude for the King.
This hideous warping of history, or even neglecting to teach it at all is the reason why I began to write historical fiction, after blogging on historical topics. It came to me that people wanted to know about those events and people who had a bearing on American history – and maybe the best way of engaging, or even encouraging that interest was to write ripping-good novels about them. There were so many stories, so many fascinating characters that I hardly knew where to begin. We have to know our history, and not through the lenses of politically-correctitude; we must have some kind of sense that our ancestors were decent, hard-working people doing the best that they could in circumstances very different from now. It gratifies me no end that some of our home-schooling neighbors have used one of my books (about a wagon-train party to California in 1844) to teach their children about the emigrant trails to California and Oregon.
“The rights and the heritage that were fought for over the years was handed to them on a silver plate and it is NOT their right to just throw that away. It is their responsibility to learn it, value it, to cherish it, and pass it on to future generations of Americans.”
Exactly why left/liberals want people to be ignorant and clueless– they want us to be “weak, morally clueless, cowards, selfish, childish, and think that government has the right to run every aspect of your life and that individual freedom is a joke and that all government is good so long as somebody else gets stuck with the bill for paying it” like Europeans.
School Suxs: The American Way (Video)
Don’t let the title fool you. This video is actually about how government-run schooling contributed to the rise of socialism, imperialism and eventually fascism in Germany between the 1890s and 1940s. Critical Thinking Question: In school we are led to believe that we are all living in an ideal vision of what society should be…But whose vision is it? And what were their ideals?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okPnDZ1Txlo&playnext=1&list=PL9325A6657749C526&feature=results_main
John Taylor Gatto has his book ‘The Underground History of American Education’ available free on his web site. It explains an awful lot about why kids are unlikely to find much education in schools, not just in America but through most (perhaps all) of the Western world.
As related to me by a local school teacher. Who can tell me what was the” Treaty of Ghent”? I know,I know – It was the answer to a question on Slumdog Millionair.
Once again folks “People Get the Government They Deserve”. Every time.
Education has been on the decline since the mid 60s’ in some areas. So long as the speical interest groups and their perpetual ‘experimentation’ is continued, education will continue to decline. Cannot forget the family break down which has little value for their childrens education.