See Thru Edu is a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation
Thomas K. Lindsay, Ph.D., Editor in Chief and Director, Center for Higher Education, Texas Public Policy Foundation
“The very term ‘Western civilization’” notes the great American social critic Christopher Lasch in a Harper’s essay from November 1994, “now calls to mind an organized system of domination designed . . . to keep the victims of patriarchal oppression – women, children, homosexuals, people of color – in a permanent state of subjugation.”
A formal education in American history serves young people best by equipping them for a life of deep and consequential membership in their own society. The College Board’s 2014 framework sadly neglects this essential civic purpose of education in history. We can, and must, do better.
In pursuit of genuine reform, a good next step would be the creation of a company to compete with the College Board as a testing and accrediting agency. This would give school districts across the country a choice about how to prepare their high school students for college-level study of American history.
As more firms have set up their own “corporate universities,” they have become less willing to pay for their managers to go to business school
If we’re concerned about how to raise ourselves up, the first step is to stop complaining about the privileges others have provided for their children. Instead . . . teach the next generation to take those advantages and do even better.
Scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that only 18% of the students are proficient in history, and less than a quarter are proficient in civics, and they remind us that “citizenship is a skill that must be taught over time with the same devotion we give to reading, math and the pursuit of scientific knowledge.”
Praising Chicago’s example, Purdue President Mitch Daniels laid out the stakes in a telephone interview: “If universities want to embarrass themselves with their behavior, allowing people to be shouted down or disinvited, that’s their problem.
From their silent role models on the faculty and in university leadership, students learn that silencing works. The mob learns that colleges like Brandeis, which disinvited women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali from campus due to intolerant complaints about her activism, will succumb to criticism rather than defend freedom.
The Trigger Warning Warriors . . . likely consider themselves immune to criticism. In fact, in their minds criticism of their Trigger Warning and re-education demands likely reinforces their view that the Western classics are oppressive.
Bills in New Jersey and Illinois have proposed banning public universities from using public funds to pay for commencement speakers.
