Daily Archives: 27 December 2016

Dumbing Down our College Pupils

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This from College Fix:

George Washington University recently changed its requirements for history majors, removing previously key courses for the stated purpose of giving students more flexibility.

The department eliminated requirements in US, North American and European history….

More flexibility.  Now, in GWU’s infinite wisdom, it’s possible for a pupil there to get a degree with a history (small ‘h,’ now) major without so much as a survey course—a 100-level Freshman course—in US history, Western history, or any idea at all about how we got where we are today: a nation that allows children to study unvarnished history at all.  This statement from Katrin Schultriss, GWU’s Department of History Chair, comes without any sense in her of the irony of her remark:

Whatever they want to do, there’s a way to make the history department work for them.

A GWU History degree is now a participation award.

Unfortunately, GWU isn’t a standout on this; they’re just joining the mediocrity of our secondary “education” system.

…fewer than one-third of the nation’s leading universities require history majors to take a single course in US history.

No knowledge of who we are or how we came to be.

Dumbing down, indeed.

It’s an Old Technique

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The technique is illustrated in HL Mencken’s Minority Report, excerpted by Don Boudreaux in his Cafe Hayek:

The really unanswerable objection to Prohibition was always the Prohibitionists.  If, in fact, they had believed honestly that forbidding rum to man would improve the world and had offered serious arguments for it, however unconvincing, most other men would have been disposed to listen to them politely.  But it was quickly manifest that improving the world was the last consideration in their minds.  What moved them was simply a violent desire to satisfy their egos by harassing their fellow-men.

It’s been about ego and not about social betterment for the Left for some time.  Even Mencken’s remark merely repeats the Left’s own characterization of its ego.  Here, to repeat a theme of my own, is Herb Croly, one of the founders of the modern Progressive movement, on his intellectual and moral inferiors:

[T]he average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.