DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE MEMORY HOLE: Educational Earthquake: ‘Disappearing’ the Great Writers From Schools.
It is hard to overstate the alarming implications of this educational earthquake. Deliberately withholding Shakespeare from young minds is a form of aesthetic starvation, but depriving them of Orwell is a moral crime. It is from Orwell’s “Animal Farm” that young minds first grasp the nature of totalitarian evil, whether it arises from the left or the right, and understand the preciousness of their freedoms.
Evil arising from the right today, such as the neo-Nazi movement, is instantly recognizable and universally deplored. But the collapse of the Soviet Union did not shame left-wing intellectuals into embarrassment for their ideology. The utopian dream of human perfectability and equality of outcome under an all-powerful state persists and grows in the West. Today, on the 70th anniversary of its 1949 publication, Orwell’s novel “1984,” which exposes the inherent perils of Marxist ideology, is as worthy of study as it was at the height of the Cold War.
“1984” was not meant as prophecy, but as warning. “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive,” Orwell said, “but that something resembling it could arrive.” Has “something resembling it” arrived in the West? Is progressivism that “something”?
Yes. Next question?
