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| Call Me Mary not Maricruz | Raise Taxes Why Don't You |
Politics and the Classroom
by Christopher Chantrill
September 17, 2007 at 4:36 am
GOOD NEWS from Iran, reported by Amir Taheri. The Iranian revolutionary regime has decided to purge the universities.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has promised to "cleanse" the Iranian educational system of what he calls "the corrupt influence of the infidel"
This the second time that the Iranian regime has decided to purge the education system. The first time was in 1980 when:
A committee created to "cleanse" academia purged more than 6,000 professors and lecturers, virtually destroying Iranian academia.
That will really help Iran in its program to take over the world.
Politics and education don’t go well together. In an article about “safe lecturing” Robert Weissberg writes about the danger of offending minority students at the university with controversial course content.
an African-American student who mangles "blacks disproportionately commit more violent crimes" into "blacks are criminals" can demand that the university itself plus sundry student-based organization rectify this "offense."... [C]rimes against racial sensibilities requires action. This is the raison d’etre for these injustice monitors and justifies salaries. To compound matters, certified victims have diplomatic immunity and can never be punished for false accusations or foolish hyper-sensitivity.
The result is that professors tend to purge anything that might be offensive from their course material. You can’t say that the rule in the constitution counting slaves as “three-fifths” of a person for congressional apportionment was actually a device to limit the representation of slave states. Some black kid heard somewhere that the three-fifths rule meant that the founders were racist.
Of course, the same thing happens with the feminists and K-12 education. In their rage to force girls to be free they have utterly transformed the education system so that nothing can happen that offends their ideas of gender neutrality.
So the result is that in education today, nothing happens. Teachers can’t teach without looking over their shoulder, and content is dumbed down to make sure that the teacher doesn’t get into trouble.
It’s probably been ever thus. But that doesn’t make it right.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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