What our institutions of "higher" learning have become and why I gave up teaching at them.
Wednesday 19 May 2010
Genocide on campus
What our institutions of "higher" learning have become and why I gave up teaching at them.
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Have you heard the plans for the new Texas Curriculum?
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/culture/education/3148-texas-textbook-massacre
Given that apparently, Texas's book buying decisions sway the textbook buying decisions of a large portion of the states, this could be a worrying development.
Not that I'm for making people feel guilty for the decisions of their country; but people still need to know about the wrong decisions of their past rulers. I can still feel proud of Britain, despite its' chequered past. Whitewashing the past of a country can never go well.
I notice that my generation seems to be profoundly conservative: it follows in its parents' footsteps, as it understands them, as much as it can. Parents made a point of differentiating themselves from their parents and being shocking to them whenever possible, my generation also tries to shock what it imagines were the sensibilities of its parents' parents. I think that the taste for exotic murderers, from Gaza to Ernie Guevara to Comrade Mao, comes from this. I was glad to be out of that environment, though I notice that a lot of the Ph.D.s I've been working with leave this attitude unexamined.
The young woman in the Arafat scarf is of course quite appalling in her own right. Sadly, her attitude is not that far from mainstream. Turn on NP[redacted]R, and (if you can bear it for ten minutes or so) once they get to Israel it's like Charlie Chaplin's Mr. Hinkel---official translation, after several minutes of mouth-foaming faux-German: "Mister Hinkel has just made a remark about the Jewish people." NP[redacted]R appears to set the fashionable attitude, and, as in Aesop's fable of the soldiers and the trumpeter, I hold them guilty.
Speaking of redacted,
I can't find the text from the
crazy man who held Mr.
Horowitz at gunpoint on live TV
to read his manifesto.
Or was he crazy???
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