Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ is what to know!
Hugo Gurdon
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When Jesse Jackson marched with leftist Stanford University students during his run for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, they chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go!”
As shallow as Jackson’s electioneering was, and as contemptible as was the fawning respect it won from left-liberal media, neither was as damaging as the substance of what was going on. Rhyming Jesse calculated that it’d help his bid for the presidency if he got into step with the Left’s long, marauding march through higher education. Now, in 2023, most traces of Western civilization have been stamped out of the curriculum, and the enterprise of elevated learning lies in ruins.
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There are honorable exceptions, such as Hillsdale College in Michigan, where classical learning is the heart of what is taught. But in most universities, the canon has been relegated to a place of disregarded unimportance if it has not been removed altogether. In many colleges, it isn’t even offered, let alone required.
Colonial studies and other political propaganda, which defame traditional courses of study, have displaced the intellectual history and critical thinking that were once the birthright of bright young people from every corner of our society, irrespective of wealth or privilege.
Academic “disciplines” claiming to descry a matrix of oppression in the classics deem it racist to teach the glory of our inherited civilization, which until a few decades ago was handed down by succeeding generations, nourishing our art, architecture, writing, drama, sciences, and philosophy through the two and a half millennia after it sprang to life in Greece in the age of Socrates.
Now, in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s invasion of Israel, in which terrorists murdered 1,300 children and men and women, young and old, we are seeing where anti-Western campus nihilism leads. Deprived of the font of truth and beauty, the unlearned activist hordes of Stanford and universities lower down the prestige scale cannot do what the Greeks first did, which was to look at facts and reality and make judgments based on truth.
Now, instead, student activists wrench the facts to fit their anti-colonial narrative. They have the pre-Greek, pre-Western reflex to treat reality as an illusion and their hideous fantasy as the path to enlightenment. Love of the truth undergirded the West’s advance to democracy, freedom, scientific preeminence, industry, invention, wealth creation, and the pursuit of happiness.
Instead, college students claim Jews are “entirely” responsible for their own murder; Israel is guilty of apartheid and “illegal occupation” even though its Arabs vote and it left Gaza 18 years ago; Jews are baby killers, even though rampaging terrorists beheaded infants. The events of the past week have made clear as perhaps nothing has before the shocking degradation of American higher education.
So here is a proposal. It is not a modest one. Nor is it a provocative Swiftian joke. It’s real. Bring back the classics. They are already reviving in grade schools, but return them to America’s universities. Reopen the doors of the academy to wisdom to reorientate our lost, indoctrinated, and painfully ignorant youth.
They have nothing to lose but their chains.