Seraphic Secret would like to add a brief follow-up to yesterday’s post about the non-apologies of Barbara Walters, Anna Wintour and Joan Juliet Buck for their enabling of the murderous Assad regime of Syria.
There is one theme that constantly appears when western progressives make excuses for their support and friendships with barbarians: “They were educated in the west.”
Let us stipulate that education is, usually, a good thing.
You are almost certainly going to be poor in America if you do not have a high school education.
And if you have a college education you will almost certainly prosper.
But those are just material benefits.
Education—hopefully—has a moral component.
If you attend Hillsdale College, you will receive an education in American values.
If you go to Yeshiva University your education will focus on Torah values.
Enroll in Bard College and you will end up worshipping Che.
Education is often a bad thing. In fact, much of so-called higher education in the west is nothing more than leftist indoctrination, radical propaganda.
Classic Marxist theory holds that revolutions are led by an educated vanguard. Those who work with their bodies are too preoccupied with putting food on the table to take time off for revolutionary activities. But university students who sleep till noon then gather in Starbucks to “deconstruct the texts” of Jane Austen are primed for socialist activism.
As all totalitarian regimes from Nazi Germany to North Korea understand it is children and the educated classes who are most vulnerable to radical propaganda.
In defense of their embrace of totalitarians Bashar al-Assad and his “thin and well dressed” but equally evil wife Asma, Barbara Walters, Anna Wintour and Joan Juliet Buck all explained that the Assads were educated in the west. As if a western education is an automatic immunization against evil.
But facts have demonstrated, again and again, that the intolerant and murderous ideologies of modern totalitarians—primarily Arab Muslim jihadists—is not refuted by a western education. In fact, a western education often enables the totalitarian.
Every single one of the 9-11 terrorists had a western education.
And almost every modern middle-eastern tyrant has been given the most expensive and exclusive private education in England or America.
It’s no surprise that elitists like Walters, Wintour, and Buck reference western education as a positive model. After all, these people are all products of such institutions. And they think the world of themselves.
Seraphic Secret believes that the leftist ideologies which permeate numerous departments of our elite universities provide the perfect breeding ground and justification for the persecution of religious minorities—Jews, Christians, Druze—and mass murder in the gobbley-gook that is multiculturalism and moral relativism.
I’m going to have to quibble with your post title, Robert. This isn’t Western education. Or perhaps I should say: This isn’t education in the Western tradition.
Remember Jesse Jackson’s protest at Stanford in 1988, when he led the protestors in chanting “Hey hey ho ho, Western Civ has got to go”? The problem with our universities is precisely that they are <i>not</i> providing a Western education any more. Jackson won.
ken:
You re technically correct, but the label is still in use, more the shame.
Robert, is that an actual picture of Obama at an actual class blackboard? If so, is there a direct link to it?
David:
As far as I know that is an actual picure of the O. I found it on Google image search.
K….”education is upstream from culture”…I’ve heard that there used to be a saying in the Royal Navy: today’s wardroom roast beef is tomorrow’s lower-deck stew. Meaning that whatever is being discussed among the officers today will tomorrow be discussed, probably in confused form, among the enlisted men.
I think this also applies to the path from academia to pseudo-serious journalists to daytime television types to the population at large.
Look at the Unibomber – Ted Kaczynski – assistant Prof at Berkeley….
Education is seen by liberals as the answer to all of the worlds problem. It’s why they accuse conservatives of being anti-science and the GOP the stupid party.
But Jonah Goldberg touched on this in Tyranny of Cliches when he talks about how conflicts are the result of misunderstandings. Pure balderdash as most conflicts are because people understand each other only too well.
As all totalitarian regimes from Nazi Germany to North Korea understand it is children and the educated classes who are most vulnerable to radical propaganda.
Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik was together with the Lubavitcher Rebbe in University in Berlin before the war.
Rabbi Soloveitchik remarked once, that the Rebbe made almost no changes to his daily religious routine while in university, except for one, that the Rebbe would immerse in the Mikva every day after classes.
Exdem:
The Rebbe made another big change during his University days: it seems from photos that he did not wear a hat or yarmulke in class.
Amen.
The effects of the leftist academy is something I don’t see addressed with nearly the frequency I would like. A postulate, and a good one of the Breitbart folks is that culture is upsteam from politics. What they’re forgetting is that education is upstream from culture. If we’re going to make a real change in direction and not a temporary fix – to be reversed at the next election – some true reform has to implemented in the American school system. Starting with the teacher’s unions and marching all the way through to post graduate education and it’s government support structure.
K:
My friend David Horowitz has done pioneering work exposing Indoctrination U.
Horowitz is to higher education what the great Andrew Breibart was to popular culture. Two great men fighting the good fight.
Both despised by their colleagues, too. I have yet to see an academic say or write a positive thing about David Horowitz.
While the broader population sees a liberal bias and tendency toward indoctrination at our colleges and universities, most academics will dismiss these concerns as unfounded and complain that our evidence is purely anecdotal. Of course, the evidence that the Tea Party is racist is similarly anecdotal and much flimsier, but it’s accepted as truth.
My youngest daughter was subjected to two jumping-up-on-the-desk rants about Republicans and conservatives from professors at two different colleges in the same year. Some day I should figure out the probability of that happening, given the null hypothesis that no attempts at indoctrination are occurring anywhere (the typical liberal stance).
So when will someone write a screen play based on his book “Destructive Generation”?