Tea at Trianon: Why College Is Never Coming Back

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, August 6, 2020

Why College Is Never Coming Back

From Forbes:

Mark my words: coronavirus will be remembered for transforming college forever. The virus has forced practically every college to move their courses online for the next semester. So instead of living on campus and walking to lectures, kids will be sitting in their bedrooms watching professors on Zoom calls.

This is FAR more disruptive than most folks realize. College is about much more than just the learning. There’s the education, and then you have the experience. The learning part has barely changed in a century. Kids still sit in 60-year-old lecture halls listening to professors. But now, the “experience” has been stripped away. Do you think teenagers will be willing to mortgage their futures in order to watch college lecture videos on the internet? (Read more.)

From RealClearEducation:

The credentialed radicals who run higher education wanted to erase America’s memory of its past. So they set out to delegitimize the standard Western Civilization survey course that was offered at many of our nation’s colleges at the time. Their effort was based on tendentious research by scholars such as Gilbert Allardyce and Lawrence Levine, who argued that before World War I Americans thought the United States was exceptional and distinct from Europe and never studied Europe and America as a civilizational unity. Allardyce and Levine argued that the Western Civ course was invented during World War I as a form of war propaganda, manufacturing a cultural connection, so our gallant doughboys would willingly sail to France to fight the Boche.

Therefore — and the therefore was always the point — who cares if you get rid of the Western Civilization course? "Hey, hey, ho, ho," Jesse Jackson and his cadre of activists chanted in 1987, "Western Culture’s got to go!" And why not? Hadn’t it been created in living memory? A professor of 70 was older than the Western Civ course! Why shouldn’t the universities dispense with it? (Read more.)