-By Thomas E. Brewton
British PC education follows American lead, wipes out Western history.
Read Lisa Fabrizio’s article, Not Their Finest Hour, on the Intellectual Conservative website.
The pull-quote summarizes the thrust of PC education in Britain:
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in Britain has dropped Winston Churchill from its list of key historical figures, in order to make room for “modern” issues.
This is straight out of the Soviet Union, where those out of favor with Stalin were liquidated and all records of their existence were expunged. Documents were destroyed or altered and photographs were retouched to remove individuals who had became non-persons.
Stalin took his cue from V. I. Lenin, who, in 1923, instructed the Commissars of Education:
We must hate — hatred is the basis of Communism. Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not Communists.
More or less the same sort of thing has happened in the United States.
In the June 19, 1997, issue of Forbes Magazine, columnist and educator Thomas Sowell wrote:
Harvard professor Nathan Glazer’s new book on multiculturalism likewise concentrates on the horse race aspects of the issues involved. His very title—”We Are All Multiculturalists Now”—announces the outcome of the horse race: We have met the enemy and we are his.
Professor Glazer points out that multiculturalism already pervades the curriculum in schools and colleges across the country. This includes Afrocentric, feminist and other “perspectives.” Studies show that more of today’s students can tell you who Harriet Tubman was than know that Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Again and again, Glazer regales us with how multiculturalism is advancing on all fronts, emphasizing the “inescapability” of what is happening, “how complete has been the victory of multiculturalism in the public schools of America,” and other expressions of a kind of “wave of the future” view of multiculturalism.
This issue – what to include in the core curriculum of college students – was covered by James Atlas in his Battle of the Books (1990). Mr. Atlas is a self-identified liberal who worked as an editor at the New York Times Magazine and wrote for iconic liberal publications such as the New York Review of Books, Atlantic Monthly, and Partisan Review (founded by New York City Trotskyites). He wrote:
Again, put simply: Has the United States become too diverse a society to embrace one idea of itself?….. Who gets to decide what books – even what languages – are taught in our schools? Is the canon an instrument of oppression – ‘the property of a small and powerful caste that is linguistically and ethnically unified,’ to quote Stanford professor Mary Louise Pratt? Or is it an instrument of liberty that will enable minorities to achieve self-esteem and – ultimately – political and economic power? …. Every effort to inculcate a body of knowledge that reflects our common history is seen as an effort to oppress.”
…. The question, as Lionel Trilling [one of the leading lights among the New York socialist intellectuals in the 1950s and 60s] framed it in a prophetic lecture, ‘The Uncertain Future of the Humanistic Educational Ideal,’ was a practical one: ‘What is best for young minds to be engaged by, how they may best be shaped through what they read – or look at or listen to – and think about.’ At Columbia, where Trilling studied and where he taught for a half-century, the Great Books Program, as it came to be known there, was firmly enshrined. The study of the ‘whole man’ – that is to say, history, ethics, and philosophy, as well as literature – was standard procedure. …….By the 1960s, the whole-man idea had been scaled down considerably. It was possible to earn a bachelor of arts without a lot of sweat.
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Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776 http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
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