Hail the Politcally Correct Savant

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This Issue...

(Full PDF of the issue)

America's education system in dire need of values.

By: George Pianka on April 20th, 2007 at 9:43 AM

Given the most recent blow to the education system in last week’s student loan express scandal, it seemed timely to address the more intimate failings of the classroom. Although the shock of an obviously flawed financial aid system providing officials with ample room for profiteering has graced the pages of The New York Times, a much more pressing and dangerous problem is often discussed anecdotally but unfortunately underestimated—agenda. Sure enough, education centered debates rage on between the secular-progressives and conservative reactionists over issues from feminism to evolutionism. The hullabaloo over the modern classroom, however, becomes more than just a mess of religious and political quarrels when placed in the proper context of the dichotomy of the universal and the particular. Arranged along the line between timeless values and artificial “niche values,” the debates manifest the growing threat of the modern miasma to golden truths at the heart of society and civilization.

When I think of “niche values,” my mind immediately travels back to Cornell’s freshmen orientation spiel on The Great Gatsby. Now, if I recall correctly, Fitzgerald is known as “the voice of the jazz age.” It comes as no surprise then that the Cornell faculty took the most “deconstructionist” angle possible to undermine his “white male voice.” If I was not preoccupied with nervousness during my first few days at a huge college, I would have broken out in laughter. The three hailed lecturers sat like a pantheon of politically correct gods at their conference table high above the auditorium floor. The diverse cast of clowns included a female women’s studies professor, a minority English professor, and a white economic professor. Not to worry: in his lecture, the economist focused almost exclusively on the impoverished plight of African American’s in the so called “jazz age.” Never mind that only one black guy shows up in the whole novel (Myrtle’s death scene). The comedy continued with the women’s studies lecturer who presented a multimedia display of changing female values in the course of past Great Gatsby films. The minority English teacher presented god-knows-what: I can barely remember, but it certainly did not strike me as a scholarly reading of the book. Speaking of the book…they forgot that part. In all their academic glory, “Cornell’s pride” did their best to neglect anything redolent of scholarship and settled instead for the discussion of secondary and trivial aspects of the novel’s background. Universal values, the timeless predicament that Gatsby’s life embodies, were sidelined for the discussion of the particular—meaning “niche values.”

The pattern extends to all levels of education, from primary to graduate studies. The efforts of feminism, race powered movements, secular-humanism, and a general sentiment of political correctness have sought to usurp the deep values of society. Instead of truth, we have moral relativism; instead of civilization, we have post-modernist deconstruction; instead of scholarship, we have comedy. I browsed through some doctoral dissertation abstracts from students in the humanities here at Cornell. Not surprisingly, most featured obfuscated statements of deconstructionist, some nihilistic, intent. Beneath the fluff, the message was clear: either to “shift,” “confuse,” “undermine,” or “dismantle,” scholarly perception of a super-particularized subset of a field (read: South Tibetan pottery). Now that I think about it, President Skorton’s inaugural ceremony did confuse my notions of what a University should teach. Centered on the notion of the daring energy of dance, the ceremony bewildered as it dismantled notions of universal truth in its ode to secular humanism, replete with Skorton and his costumed posse as priests of a different color—robes, sashes and all. The speech made little sense, but apparently these robed faculty are leading some cultish dance for an ill-defined freedom. As Skorton put it: “And make no mistake, the faculty dance is hugely improvisational, not to be constrained, not to be managed, but to be respected, nurtured, supported and set free.” By freedom here is meant burning conservative publications in class and nurturing gender studies’ professors’ hair brained “research” with showers of funding. Make no mistake; education is losing fast any sense of construction, any sense of civilization, settling instead for a generally diffusive effort of flailing limbs and exasperation: a wild dance, to borrow a metaphor.

But there is an agenda beneath the nihilistic tendency of classroom praxis. There are steps the cosmopolitan, multicultural, sexually open, politically correct individual must learn if he is to engage in the automaton-like conformity leftist idealogues hunger after--a great dance. I know, again with the metaphor, but it’s just so good in that way he probably did not intend. Stripping away the values and precepts of our ancestors, releasing a great cathartic “exploration,” particularizing education to the point of veneration of cultural subsets and minority views, they hope to craft something in the likeness of that annoying sophomoric polemic you sometimes get stuck sitting next to in class—a politically correct savant. Join the team, “join the dance,” nurture the exploration, and lose your identity and values in the ensuing nihilism. Everything is right, so nothing is right. The solution: Hillary Clinton. Just kidding, but the eerie Orwellian link was well depicted in the recent “Big Sister” ad on YouTube. The point is, liberal agenda in education is the most recent manifestation of totalitarian control. With technology and rhetoric Stalin could only dream of, idealogues foist fabricated feminist histories, undermine American traditions and values in the classroom, and “confuse and befuddle” little boys and girls until the only thing uniting us is the state—a favorite liberal tool for control.

The much vaunted 1994 Gender Equality in Education Act has, for example, provided ample legal wiggling room for cases to rewrite reality, in addition to providing tens of millions in federal funds for the politicized research of feminist “experts.” California, with its enormous clout in the textbook market, has set legal requirements for sex-neutral language, and guidelines for textbooks demanding that the contributions of men and women in history, the arts, and sciences have to appear in equal numbers. The values of our society also come under attack packaged in elementary school literature. Kate O’Beirne cites the vivid example of Professor Vitz’s (NYU—psychology) research in her most recent book. Examining elementary school readers, he could “unearth no positive portrayals of motherhood or marriage for women” and in romantic tales, women saved men, but no man ever tried to save a woman.” Kind of like Ted Kennedy. So much for masculine virtue: we’ll leave that to paragons like P. Diddy—sorry, Diddy. Evidently, the erosion of our timeless values is the principle goal of such agenda-driven mis-education. Certainly, the fallacy that female students struggle in the current “patriarchic system” and such revision needing subjects as history is no longer tenable. An Education Department report Trends in Education Equity for Girls and Women found that girls bested boys on every measure of educational achievement.

While at home for spring break, I picked up a copy of the New Oxford Review with an article entitled “The Spider and the Bee.” Referring to Jonathan Swift’s 1704 story “Battle of the books,” the article incisively explored the idea of Universal truths and the particularistic assault in education, the first embodied by the bee in Swift’s story, the other by the spider. As the spider claims superiority over the bee for spinning his own webs, for his originality, for his self-sufficiency, the bee calmly points out that the material for the spider’s craft is essentially discharge from his posterior. The bee then relates how he goes from flower to flower, cultivating the golden truth. The author of the article noted how the convention in education today is not to harvest the underlying values and truth in works of literature, history, art, and general study, but to focus on one particular group, the more minor and marginal the better. It reminds me of an article in Time magazine I read titled “Who Will Be the Voice of this Generation?” Pointing out that we no longer have men like Fitzgerald to encapsulate an era in literature, the author sidesteps in a Skorton-like manner: “Listen for the singular voice of the current generation, and you'll hear something else, something different: multiple voices, singing not in unison, but in harmony.” With the erosion of our society’s values, with tradition cleaved in many particularistic and diffuse parts, with identity a hazy subject, and with universality felled, where can we turn but to the state to unite us all? If you happen to be a politically correct savant, fear not. Vote “Big Sister” in the upcoming election for a new sense of self.

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