A SUICIDAL INDIFFERENCE

There is nothing earth shattering in declaring that public education in the West has sunk to disastrous levels. And the way out of that is not to throw more and more money at the problem because the statistics clearly indicate that money does not equate with quality.

Why is that?

Well it might be as Thomas Sowell opines when he said, 

“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”

There is no doubt in my mind that Thomas Sowell has identified a significant weakness, perhaps a result of the radical feminization of the culture? (Before you recoil in horror I am merely stating that sometimes a virtue overstated can become a vice). 

However I think that Patrick Deneen has nailed the core problem of our civilisation. 

This is a Notre Dame intellectual who having taught at Princeton University and Georgetown University is flabbergasted at the tragic state of learning and is not shy to say so in ways that might cause a few SJW's to head for the nearest 'safe space' and plunge their heads into an available sand bucket (emphasis mine):

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilisation, a civilisation that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

He explains why this has come about:

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

He continues:

Our students are the achievement of a systemic commitment to producing individuals without a past for whom the future is a foreign country, cultureless ciphers who can live anywhere and perform any kind of work without inquiring about its purposes or ends, perfected tools for an economic system that prizes “flexibility” (geographic, interpersonal, ethical).

In such a world, possessing a culture, a history, an inheritance, a commitment to a place and particular people, specific forms of gratitude and indebtedness (rather than a generalised and deracinated commitment to “social justice”), a strong set of ethical and moral norms that assert definite limits to what one ought and ought not to do (aside from being “judgemental”) are hindrances and handicaps.

I happen to consider the end goals of those who have accomplished this 'generational intellectual suicide' to be rather more dark than he gives them credit for, but that is another story for another day.