Elliot Resnick
A hundred years ago, about 10 percent of the last American high school graduates attended College. Today this number is 61 percent. Is it better?
Hardly.
“The goal of education is wisdom,” writes Robert M. Hutchins, editor of Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Book Series. But do such contemporary students achieve in college? Wisdom?
Or they appear with what the author Douglas Murray calls Nihilist’s Creed: “Your is senseless existence in a senseless universe”?
Nihilism would not really be so bad. If university graduates were only nihilists, they would drown in decadence, but at least they would leave us alone. Unfortunately, as Murray writes, “most people in their lives look for a form of certainty.” And so many graduates are not satisfied with the declaration, as always skeptical Socrates, that they know nothing. Instead, they certainly say that they Down Know something: America is a racist to its core.
Should we be surprised, therefore, that the Democrats – the products of our “best” universities – do not think about blocking their political opponents, arrest lawyers and censoring conservative voices? Sure, these actions violate holy norms that reach 250 years, but who cares about the norms when the people who founded them were bad white people?
Ten years ago, President Dartmouth College, James Freedman, allegedly said: “The purpose of developing a university is to question your father’s value.” Well, contemporary students do it in Piki. They enter the university as nice, normal children and emerge as incensed, hating adult America.
America is studying in college, she was invented in sin. Instead of focusing on what distinguished America on its assumption from the rest of the world – the Republican Government, individual freedom, egalitarianism, etc. – the features that have shared virtually every society in history: slavery and racism are obsessive.
“Thomas Jefferson was the owner of slaves!” They constantly remind us – as if they were not slaves themselves if they lived in the Jefferson era. Meanwhile, they ignore the unprecedented amount of a flourishing man supported by the country Jefferson, who helped find. Every year, millions of people try to emigrate – not to China, Botswana or Peru – but to America. They should ask themselves why. Why would millions gather in the “racist, sexist, xenophobic” country?
IN Last interviewThe President of Harvard University, Alan Garber, argued that if President Trump still suspends billions of dollars in federal subsidies at Harvard in America. No, it won’t. On the contrary, it is true. The more the government harms American universities, the better America will be.
It wasn’t always like that. In the 16th century, the University of Harvard was a pious institution in which students had to translate biblical fragments from Hebrew and Greek to Latin to graduate from school. At Yale, President Ezra Stiles (1727-1795) “demanded from his students at the university to master the psalms, because he expected that they would be the first singing, that his students would hear when they would reach heaven, and that would be very embarrassing for him, their teacher, if they did not know them” Professor David Rudavsky writes.
We could use – we really need desperate – universities such as Harvard and Yale a long time ago. We need institutions that present to students the treasures of Western civilization and (to cite Douglas Murray again) effectively say: “Here is the heritage of thoughts, culture, philosophy and religions that cultivated people for thousands of years and can also meet you.”
In this country we have a handful of such institutions – Hillsdale is the most significant example. But until we get several dozen more, this country could use much less university graduates.
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Dr. Elliot Resnick is the former main editor of The Jewish Press, the host of the podcast and the author and/or editor of 10 books, including “In A World Gone Mad: An Appel for Sane thinking about Israel, Trump, War & More. Follow him on X on @resnkelliot.
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