Today is Ascension Thursday, when Christians commemorate Christ ascending into Heaven (Acts 1). Most moderns prefer to let their minds descend as far as possible into the vulgar, vile, stupid, and hateful. That is certainly true of most “educators” now. In the 1900s, educators began developing a complicated and pointless professional vocabulary and focusing more on politics, sexuality, or Marxist social experiments than on teaching kids useful information and truths. We see the disastrous results.
The great G. K. Chesterton, who was born on this day in 1874, was very clear-sighted about the tendency of academia to become a closed system enamored of unrealistic and outright false theories (that’s why Booker T. Washington wanted to combine classical education with practical manual labor skills).
Chesterton observed, “While there are stupid people everywhere, there is a particular minute and microcephalous idiocy which is only found in an intelligentsia. I have sometimes fancied that, as chilly people like a warm room, silly people sometimes like a diffused atmosphere of intellectualism and long words.”
There are countless examples of this, but one particularly applicable to today is the critical race theory (CRT)/diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) nonsense.
Related: Chaos in Academia and Families and the Threat to Free Government
The Trump administration is trying to eradicate DEI from schools and universities that receive federal funding, but it is slow going as the silly intelligentsia just rename DEI programs and activist judges try to block everything. Speaking of activist judges, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun of Massachusetts has joined the ranks of those gavel-wielding petty tyrants wrecking our Republican system of government, ruling that Donald Trump cannot abolish the unconstitutional Department of Education or return education to the states, which is what is constitutionally required.
“This court cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the Department’s employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the Department becomes a shell of itself,” Joun hysterically declared. Except that the department should never have been created to begin with and has been an unmitigated disaster ever since. It has been a significant factor in fueling the politicization, wokification, and stultification of education. There’s a reason the Founders didn’t put the federal government in charge of education.
Meanwhile, the DEI dictators aren’t giving up easily. Brown University, one of whose doctors is reportedly planning to perform a double mastectomy on a gender dysphoric girl this week, recently went after a conservative student newspaper after it exposed the university’s extensive DEI operations. And institutions that have renamed DEI initiatives include the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, the Mayo Clinic, Hudson City Schools (OH), West Chester University, Activision, Arizona State University, Kohl’s, UPS, and Disney.
There really is a particular minute and microcephalous idiocy which is only found in intelligentsia.
