But teaching about actual warfare? Hey, if clip art can kill as virtually the entire Professional Left claimed to believe for a week or two in January, imagine what a whole book devoted to warfare can do. Which is why Walter Russell Mead notes that a certain key work of the last several centuries is slowly being relegated to back catalog status in academia:

Clausewitz’s unfinished masterpiece On War stands out as perhaps the greatest work of strategic thought human reflection has yet produced.  Coming as it does in both the Yale and the Bard curricula after a series of other classics going back to Sun Tzu, Clausewitz’s treatment, even in its somewhat muddled state, stands out as the most comprehensive and clear cut statement on a host of vital topics connected to power and to war.

It belongs on that short list of classics that serious people should read and reread during their lives, but it is one of many classics that our culture neglects.  Our somewhat PC and namby-pamby age generally puts works like On War somewhere back in the stacks hoping perhaps that if nobody thinks about war there won’t be any. There is also a certain feeling that a book this blunt and power focused should not be part of a liberal arts curriculum.

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Funny, you’d think you’d have to teach about War, to teach about the Moral Equivalent of War. Which is already being taught in abundance on campus (though not under that name). But increasingly, students are only getting one side of the story:

Scholastic dared present factual information in an education curriculum about American energy production, called the United States of Energy. Because it didn’t go all in for the green agenda (it said nice things about coal, for instance) it didn’t mesh with the leftist worldview. Soon it became vilified and came under attack by the usual radical environmentalist suspects (TreeHugger, Greenpeace and Sierra Club, for instance) and media liberals at Mother Jones, the New York Times (which coined the term “Big Coal” to hammer the American Coal Foundation, which helped fund the curriculum), and Rethinking Schools. The left wing Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood seems to have driven the entire campaign. These groups hunt in packs, and they all seem to have been mouthing from the same set of talking points, about “pushing coal in the classroom” and so forth.

These groups ripped Scholastic from several directions and got yet another liberal propaganda campaign tucked into our schools, one that fits the left’s agenda of ditching fossil fuels before we have the technology to replace them, and command average Americans’ choices and lives down to the kindergarten level.

This is the latest in the left’s campaign against fossil fuels, claiming that providing children any information on coal is commercial indoctrination, worthy of an all out ideological war. But the original lesson packet wasn’t limited to coal, and also included general information on nuclear, hydroelectric power, wind, natural gas and solar energy.

Now, Scholastic seems intent to focus on promoting environmental activism through children by promoting the book The Down-to-Earth-Guide to Global Warming, which was written by Al Gore’s co-producer of An Inconvenient Truth, Laurie David. When the Goracle gets his due, the left has won. The left’s Luddite diktats have replaced what they denounced as the coal industry’s advocacy.

Hey, Al Gore wasn’t kidding when he dubbed his worldview an Assault on Reason. And of course, as the War on Pronouns heated up, and Newspeak Dictionary shrunk, and Gaia replaced both von Clausewitz and Edison in the classroom, the new Ministers of Truth began to look increasingly silly to those of us who stand outside the cult:

On page A-6 of The Washington Post on Thursday, Post reporter Krissah Williams found Princeton professor Cornel West stirred up debate among black bloggers and academics for calling the president a “black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.” The Post skipped over the next line: “And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”In a Monday interview with radical former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, West said: “I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men…It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation.”

And thus, the speed at which we return to zero increases exponentially.

Related: “‘Western Civ’ Courses Have Declined Since 1964, Report Says.”