UNIVERSITIES, [Donald Kagan] proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance . . .
. . . of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the way traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values." He counseled schools to adopt "a common core of studies" in the history, literature and philosophy" of our culture." By "our" he means Western.
This might once have been called incitement. In 1990, as dean of Yale College, Mr. Kagan argued for the centrality of the study of Western civilization in an "infamous" (his phrase) address to incoming freshmen. A storm followed. he was called a racist -- or as the campus daily more politely editorialized, a peddler of "European cultural arrogance."
. . . . The PC wars of the 1990s feel dated. Maybe, as one undergrad told me after the lecture, "the pendulum has started to swing back" toward traditional values in eduction.
Mr. Kagan offers another explanation. "You can't have a fight," he says one recent day in his office, "because you don't have two sides. The other side won."
. . . .
Thucdides identified man's potential for folly and greatness. Mr. Kagan these days tends toward the darker view. He sees threats coming from Iran and in Asia, yet no leadership serious about taking them up. The public is too ignorant and irresponsible to care. . . .
The Kagan thesis is bleak but not fatalistic. The fight to shape free citizens in schools, through the media and in the public square goes on.
"There is no hope for anything if you don't have a population that buys into" a strong and free society, he says. "That can only be taught. It doesn't come in nature."
(Matthiew Kaminski, "'Democracy May Have Had Its Day,'" wsj.com, April 27, 2013)
"Through the media" in that last sentence is the heart of Unca D's critique of the Houston Chronicle editorial board, which is on the wrong side of the cultural shift that Mr. Kagan identifies. There, as it Yale, "you don't have two sides."
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