Who Killed the Liberal Arts?|5 Minute Video
What in the world occurred to the liberal arts? A degree in the humanities used to send the understanding and knowledge imbued in the works of excellent Western artists, writers, artists and thinkers like Shakespeare and Mozart. Today, that exact same degree stresses Western racism, sexism, imperialism, and other ills and sins that enhance a sense of victimhood and narcissism.
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Script:
Here’s a tragedy, in its way, on the level of King Lear or Hamlet.
To get a bachelor’s degree in English literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, among the most prestigious colleges in America, you need to enroll in Gender, Race, Sexuality, special needs or ethnicity Studies; in Imperial Transnational or Post-Colonial Studies; and in Critical Theory. However you are not required to take a single course in Shakespeare.
In other words, the UCLA English faculty is now formally indifferent regarding whether an English significant has ever check out a word of the best writer of the English language, but is determined to expose trainees, according to the course catalogue, to “alternative rubrics of gender, class, race, and sexuality.” Sadly, UCLA is not leading a motion; it is following one.
That motion looks for to infuse the liberal arts curriculum with the particular scholastic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning intricacy of the past to identity and class politics.
In so doing, the contemporary professoriate has actually repudiated the excellent humanist custom on which much of Western Civilization– and the Western university– has been developed. That custom was founded on an intense desire to engage with the genius of the past.
The 14th century Florentine poet Francesco Petrarch set off the surge of understanding known today as the Renaissance with his discovery of Livy’s huge history of Rome and the letters of Cicero, the Roman statesman whose concepts would inspire the similarity John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Petrarch’s burning drive to recuperate the lost cultures of Greece and Rome was extensively shared and moved the Renaissance humanists to search for long-forgotten manuscripts in remote castles and abbeys throughout Europe.
The fantastic universities spread this new knowledge throughout the Western world, teaching it to students who in turn taught it to the next generation.
Now compare the classical humanists’ hunger for learning with the resentment of a Columbia University trainee, who had been needed by Columbia’s freshman core curriculum to study Mozart. “Why did I have to listen … to this Mozart?” she complained. “My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and bigotry. There are no women, no people of color.”
These are not the distinctive thoughts of one absurd student. They represent the dominant ideology in the humanities today. This student found out to think like this at the university itself.
Instead of encouraging trainees to engage with the fantastic minds of the past, today’s liberal arts teachers look for just to confirm their own worldview.
The yearly gathering of America’s literature faculty put at the top of its 2014 agenda the discussion of “embodiment, poverty, environment, activism, reparation, and the condition of being unequally governed,” all in order to “expose key websites of vulnerability and evaluate possibilities for change.”
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What in the world happened to the liberal arts? A degree in the humanities utilized to send the knowledge and wisdom imbued in the works of great Western artists, authors, musicians and thinkers like Shakespeare and Mozart. Today, that exact same degree tensions Western bigotry, sexism, imperialism, and other ills and sins that enhance a sense of victimhood and narcissism. Now compare the classical humanists’ appetite for discovering with the resentment of a Columbia University student, who had actually been required by Columbia’s freshman core curriculum to study Mozart. These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one foolish trainee.
