More Hustling of the Liberal Arts

More inflation of the liberal arts. "The liberal arts free the soul not only from oppression and dominating power structures, but for the good life." Not even Christ may free us from external oppression and unjust power structures, but Christ, and only Christ, frees us from sin. What else won't American liberal arts school do? Turn young males into men, because they have neither the ethos, faculty members, or the requisite understanding to do so. Indeed, virtually all, including conservative or Catholic ones, take pride in being egalitarian and co-ed. And so the majority of liberal arts schools will die out, along with other cultural institutions, and deservedly so as a Divine punishment, whether they realize it or not. (Those given charge of the schools will probably proclaim their innocence of any wrong-doing until the end.)

The liberal arts cultivate a way to respond to the world better. https://t.co/DIPDaPWHhl

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) December 4, 2020

Jessica Hooten Wilson

Chavagnes Still Exists

But for how much longer? Is formal schooling the best environment for training a young male into worship? What is the appropriate ritual for initiating a male into adulthood? (Neo-)Confucians would be most sympathetic to the approach taken by Catholic liberal educators. And should such an initiation ritual take place outside the tribe or community to which a young man belongs? Probably not.

Education and Devotion: A School of the Lord’s Service - Guest Article by Ferdi McDermott https://t.co/EBMTkpO5YK pic.twitter.com/1wezG6RHHM

— NLM (@NLMblog) December 3, 2020

NLM: Education and Devotion: A School of the Lord’s Service - Guest Article by Ferdi McDermott

Clueless Latin Catholic Academics

CWR: Catholic universities, contemplation, and our cultural future by Joseph G. Trabbic
What many parents still fail to grasp is that their children’s university education isn’t just going to get them a job, it’s going to give them a worldview.

We can redeem the culture in the twenty-first century, if we want to. Universities are essential to that project. The good news is that in Catholic higher education we don’t need to start from scratch. The institutions already exist to advance this project. They only need our encouragement, support, and the right leadership.

Culture must be redeemed first by existing healthy communities; higher education is proving itself increasingly irrelevant and unnecessary to the creation of community, and Latins will have to learn how to do without them in an age of collapse.

University of St. Katherine

Down With the Techies

I'm generally not a fan of Peter Lawler's writing as he's too much of a nationalist and a Straussian but he's probably correct in his judgment here: Silicon Valley: Trashing the Liberal Arts

Chesterton on Liberal Arts Education

Post by The American Chesterton Society.

Post by The American Chesterton Society.

Thaddeus Kozinski on Liberal Education

The Uselessness of Liberal Education: An Apology by Thaddeus Kozinski

Related:
Surprising Thoughts on Female Education from the Middle Ages by Angelina Stanford
The Education of Princess Mary Tudor
How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

“The Integration of Theory and Practice”

Begun on October 16.

“The Integration of Theory and Practice:” Eric Heubeck’s Proposal For Cultural Guerilla War against the Leftist Establishment

I was looking through Orthosphere, and this caught my attention. As the introduction explains, the author of the essay is "Eric Heubeck, a protégé of Paul Weyrich at the Free Congress Foundation." Is the essay reconcilable with a localist/right communitarian program? Certain much of that proposal is precisely that. But it's more. Alan Roebuck writes in his introduction to the essay:

What I find most appealing about Heubeck’s proposal is that it combines the two different strategies that traditionalist conservatives propose, but that are generally regarded as mutually exclusive: retreat, in order to develop a non-liberal counterculture, and attack, in an attempt to retake the nation.

Let's take a closer look at one section:

Support of an Elite More Valuable than Support of the Masses

We will initially operate according to the belief that it is more important to win over the elites (or create a new, better one) than to build up a mass movement. Furthermore, it is more important to have a few impassioned members than a large number of largely indifferent members. The amount of energy, élan, and self-assurance that we are able to inculcate in the leaders of our movement will ultimately determine its success or failure.

The new movement must be, in part, exclusive and elite. It must not be afraid to pass along a body of knowledge that is not readily accessible to and understandable by everyone. The strong appeal of a feeling of exclusivity and superiority will give our members a reason to endure the slings and arrows of popular disapproval.

The New Traditionalist movement will appeal to the masses, but not immediately. The ideas of the masses never come from the masses. To the extent that the masses are more conservative than the elites, this is primarily because the masses have a long collective memory, and they still value the beliefs articulated by a long-lost elite. The conservative instincts of the American people will continue to erode unless a new elite is formed to refresh that memory.

We must recognize that literature and philosophy do not appeal to the masses. This is why we must develop ways to spread our philosophy using non-rational means–especially the moving image.

Is he talking about the political, economic, intellectual, and social elites of this country? If the former, I don't think there is much of a shot at this happening, unless they already happen to be devout Christians. There may be a few, but how many of them are believers in "capitalism" or partisan Republicans? Certain priests who come into contact with the elites (like members of PSHC of Opus Dei) may evangelize and convert some, but how likely is this to happen? We do not seek to change just "private" morality, but healthy communities, and these need to have some measure of autarky, as well as be sustainable and resilient. It is more likely that a new "elite" will have to be created, but how?

A healthy and flourishing Christian community may be able to convert some of the wealthy, who can then act to preserve that community through their monetary support.

As it is unlikely that traditional conservatives could gain control of a national media outlet, what about employing alternate mass media sources (like the internet)? But is this not already being done now? What obvious results can we see from this?

Leaders for the group will be selected - but will there be a formal mechanism for this? Who gets to decide who gets to be a leader, unless they are already leaders? Or will leaders be recognized informally by the other members of the group, standing apart from the others because of their abilities, dedication, and the respect that they've gained? They may not have money but they make up for it in character and the commitment to a place. Do we Uhmericans have the sufficient humility that enables us to recognize that others are more qualified for leadership than we?

Traditional communities can foster a local identity (we recognize that there are valid differences between local cultures) while adhering to a common intellectual patrimony (or [Western] culture). Is that intellectual patrimony sufficient to define a group? No. There are also the [local] customs and mores.

As for the place of modern mass "art" in such an effort - they may be a necessary "cultural" reference points, but do movies and television suffice as stories and bearers of tradition? I am doubtful of their cultural value as a whole, other than providing images for the development of the moral imagination for beginners - scenes of heroism and virtue. The problem with the moving image is that one cannot replicate it through words, either spoken, through [lyric] poetry, or written, in books. To make use of the moving image one must have the means to display it, and  in a future without cheap electricity, one should not depend too much upon it for the transmission of culture to the next generation.

Referring to the classics may not be enough to recover the tradition, if people are ignorant of the classics, but substituting movies and television shows is inadequate because they are unable to provide a long-lasting foundation for the transmission of the tradition. The neo-traditionalist leadership may need to study the classics, philosophy, political science; what suffices for the "average" traditionalist conservative? The knowledge of their history, familiarity with the intellectual tradition, coupled with a sound moral formation?

What stories do we tell and what history do we remember? Is it possible to create a history wholly anew? No, because we are not generated spontaneously from nothing. The Christian community will have their saints, but it is proper that we remember those who may not have been as holy but nonetheless contributed to the well-being of those who came before us and of our communities. As for our experience in being part of a nation/empire - this is reality, not something we can ignore in our history-telling, as if we could just wish it away. But the degeneration of the federal union into empire can be a useful warning to future generations.

A reader at iSteve comments on Are the English better at English?:

California schools are making a big push for reading and writing. I know my children's elementary school requires 20 minutes of reading a night, starting in kindergarten. Children have a Reading Counts (Scholastic Books program where children take a computer test on books they've read) point goal they have to meet each grade period and point totals are posted for the class. It becomes a competition within the class. My children had to start writing structured paragraphs in first grade. They do a lot more writing than I ever did as a child.

I have noticed this in the classroom as well. 5th and 6th graders are learning to write essays, a skill I didn't learn until 7th or 8th grade. Another example of accelerating the curriculum in order to make up (prevent) failure at the upper grades? I learned that my so-called "college writing" skills I picked up in HS were not really adequate for the college-level, as the course in rhetoric plus two years at Christendom showed me.

When students do not know how to write sentences well or good grammar, should they be learning how to compose essays? Along with grammar, essay composition requires some knowledge of argumentation and rhetoric. Backing up opinion is just the start to learning how to reason well. Do 5th and 6th graders have enough experience to write details or observations for a persuasive essay? The imposition of the order of learning must be age-appropriate or what is being imparted will be wasted. But contemporary mass education, being pressured to produce results and remedy poor performances by high school students, has no time for this.

Items of Interest, 22 April 2012

Thomas Fleming, The Rationality of Anders Breivik

Fabius Maximus: Rome speaks to us. Their example can inspire us to avoid their fate.

New Book: Forgotten Conservatives in American History by Winston Elliott III (the new book is by Brion McClanahan and Clyde N. Wilson)

Edmund Burke and Natural Rights

Sound the Alarm to the People: James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and the Principles of 1798

Paul Gottfried, Throwing People Under the Bus to Stop a Runaway Vehicle

Justin Raimondo, Problems of Empire and Race and Empire

US Pushing Libya Model for Upcoming Syria War

Ron Unz, China's Rise, America's Fall

Let's be clear - the ruling intellectual elite are psychotic, not ignorant
Hawaiian Libertarian, Escape the Zoo

How democracy devolves into tyranny by John Milbank

Andrew Haines, Cohabitating is Bad
Cohabitation and Happily Ever After: A Response to Meg Jay

Obama's Birth Certificate a Forgery?
Obama Officially Ineligible
Tom O'Halloran
Daily Paul

Economics and Sustainability:
Life Without Usury
Let's Build a Future Without Cars
Health Care: An Anarchist Approach
Permaculture Magazine #72
John Medaille, Friends and Strangers: A Meditation on Money
Recovered Economic History: “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious”
By Yasha Levine

Dan Barber: foie gras parable: TED TALKS: documentary,lecture,talk


Catholic:
Music for Private Devotion, Not Liturgy
What's Wrong With NFP
Thomas More: True Enlargement of Mind
Rasing the Bar: Christianity and Liberal Arts in the University by Randall B. Smith

Orthodox:
Greek Orthodox Church Collapsing Due to on Impoverished Government

Feminism:
Young Women Are More Career-Driven Than Men Now - James Poulos asks why.
Eliminate Feminism Forever

The Battle Against Nature’s Sexism by Mary Rose Somarriba

Thomas Hibbs reviews Damsels in Distress.

Diet and Health:
Karen De Coster, Searching for the Perfect Human Diet
8 Natural Cold Remedies to Improve Immunity
Ask The Low-Carb Experts (Episode 13): ‘Low-Carbing Women & Weight Lifting’ | Dr. Cassandra Forsythe (mp3)
Natural Remedies for Seasonal Allergies
Coconut Oil Reverses Dementia in 100 Year-Old Woman

Music:
Fiddler Mark O'Connor is changing how people play the instrument
Striggio Mass In 40 Parts by Wendy Gillespie (mp3)

Breaking: U.S. Army places order for 24,000 M4 carbines with Remington

New Prometheus Viral Video Arrives
First Look At Anthony Hopkins' Hitchcock
For Sacha Gervasi's latest

The Heart and the Fist

A book by Eric Greitens, who advertises himself as a SEAL. His interview on the Diane Rehm Show earlier this year. Charlie Rose and The Colbert Report. ABC.net.au and NPR.
Gary Snyder Show (mp3)



Does he justify American imperial forays in the name of humanitarianism? Does he represent Kaplan's "soldier-diplomat"? He wrote an essay for the Fall 2009 Phi Beta Kappa newsletter, The Key Reporter, in which he praises service-learning as a means of developing phronesis. I think he is wrong, because phronesis cannot be developed unless it is first within one's own community and in accordance with the order of charity. The dogmatic liberal do-gooder who loves all equally does not have phronesis, even if he may have misguided benevolence. A liberal arts education presupposes the proper moral development in a community, it does not lead to it. We can even see the proper moral development in the example of the Rwandans themselves, who act virtuously (or not) in their own communities and towards their own neighbors. They do not seek to improve themselves by going somewhere else and meddling in the affairs of others, the secular version of the Christian missionary who has left home in order to serve God first of all.

(Phi Beta Kappa is so Uhmerican in many ways. This is an organization which believes Martha Nussbaum is worthy of being honored, after all. Let the ivory tower fall down.)

Essay after the jump.

Single-sex secondary schools

Started on Oct. 29.

What sort of pitch should one make to a Catholic girls high school in order to be interviewed for a job? I don't doubt that most American Catholic schools are infected with feminism, which has distorted their understanding of the lay vocation for women and hence their mission. Some may try to nuance it by embracing some form of Catholic feminism, but despite talk about the importance of motherhood there is still an acceptance of the paradigm of pursuing a career in an industrial or post-industrial economy. What about teaching young Catholic women about what is necessary for nurturing marriages and taking care of husbands?

It is proper that the chaplaincy be supervised by the bishop, especially if the school is a diocesan one. It is charged with strengthening the spiritual lives of the young women who attend the school after all. But it should also provide support with respect to what the school teaches about the lay vocation and feminism. Otherwise, the dissonance between the school and the chaplaincy, coupled with the pressure of the outside world which embraces feminism and radical egalitarianism, will diminish the authority of the school and its message. But what American bishop is willing to take all of feminism on and re-establish patriarchy in the domestic sphere? If the bishop is ultimately unwilling to take a stand against feminism, what can an teacher or administrator do? Someone could argue that unless you have a foot in the door, you can't reform education, but what chance can there be if there is no support from the diocese for such reform?

What about preparing the students for college so that they can "earn a living" until they get married? What sort of college/career planning advice are they receiving currently? I am sure it is the same sort of advertising for college that is peddled at non-Catholic schools. Are they being prepared to become workers in the knowledge economy? What sort of majors are being encouraged? Are students advised about student debt and the likelihood of finding an office job? Defenders of the school's current direction may say that this is what can Catholic schools do, that's the way the system is. "We're just doing our best to prepare Catholics to inhabit the society in which they live," and that means that in order for the education to be "practical" it must help them go to college. Women need the income that a college education provides to support a family, etc., especially when the school is located in an area that has a high standard of living.

In the age of declining cheap energy supplies, schools cannot help but offer an education that is more practical and sustainable in order to stay in business, if that is even possible in the long run. Has the school not been remiss in examining alternatives to the dominant post-industrial paradigm? A purely liberal education is affordable only for those who do not need to concern themselves with seeking a living. Still, it may include a decent beginning to a liberal education at the secondary level, maintaining high standards or even elevating them. But this should be coupled with training in practical life skills, including the domestic arts and child-raising, especially if the students' families do not have these skills to pass on to them.

Catholic education is usually advertised as a means of imparting lessons in Catholic spirituality/living to students. (This has been diluted to education about values or social justice in many schools.) What sort of communal participation and networking does such a high school have, which are oriented towards nurturing femininity, as opposed to career preparation and secular humanistic conceptions of "service"?

What of the quality of the education? American secondary education does not advance true learning, but indoctrination, and the religious education is suspect. How can one offer an alternative understanding of American history or citizenship, if the students are learning primarily from textbooks? As far as I can tell, the state standards do not mandate the nationalist interpretation of American history, but how many teachers would be willing to question it?

How much money do alumnae donate to the school? What are the stats like on divorces and so on? How many have two-income families? But how many of the alumnae will be returning to live in the area? Does the school offer a better understanding of what it means to live in a community than its secular counterparts? If the school is located in Sacramento, is there a better chance that it can help its students reclaim an agrarian way of life?

Related:
NYT article on St. John's College: Seeing Value in Ignorance, College Expects Its Physicists to Teach Poetry
Rod Dreher: Classical education? What can you do with that?

"Carnivore"

When men get a degree or go through a vocational program and then land a job, they’ve normally got 40+ years to contribute to increasing the wealth of society. Women “playing” career damage society:
1. They displace men for positions in college or vocational school.
2. Upon landing a job, they displace other men for the job position.
3. The increase in the labor pool drives down wages (supply & demand).
4. While in the labor pool, women are less effective and less productive than men.
5. Because they are in the labor pool and cannot compete with men, women support labor laws to enforce “equality” which burden businesses and can cause men to get fired due to some infringement or just to meet quotas.
6. When they leave the labor pool after becoming bored, there is now a hole than can be difficult to fill because the men who would normally fill it have been displaced for all the reasons above. There was recent discussion on some blog with a link to an article about this exact problem with physicians in the UK.

In some sense, I can agree with the comment that women were advised to pursue education and careers as the ONLY option. Women do NOT know what they want. They have to be guided. Most parents have so bought into feminism that they don’t see any other way. It’s a riot – or sad – talking to parents when they go into all the detail about choosing a college, going on campus visits, making sure she gets into the best school, etc., etc. You would think these parents would spend their time and energy on prepping their daughters for the most important life decision – choosing a man for marriage, how to make a husband happy and how to raise healthy children.

And yet, if parents were to advise their daughters to prep for marriage instead of a career, and there is a decent girl who truly wants to please her husband and raise a nice family,how would she find a man who’s in college? It would seem that the dating and courting scene would have to change as well and go back to earlier methods.

Dr. O'Reilly's lecture on Catholic liberal education

TAC: Catholic Liberal Education by Dr. Paul O’Reilly (mp3)

Narcissus Regards a Book By Mark Edmundson

What was this thing called Western culture? Who created it? Who sanctioned it? Most important: What was so valuable about it? Why did it matter to study a poem by Blake, or ponder a Picasso, or comprehend the poetry latent in the religions of the world?


I'm not sure that teachers and scholars ever offered a good answer. The conservatives, protected by tenure, immersed in the minutiae of their fields, slammed the windows closed when the parade passed by. They went on with what they were doing. Those who concurred with the students bought mikes and drums and joined the march. They were much in demand in the news media—figures of great interest. The Washington Post was calling; the Times was on the other line. Was it true? Were the professors actually repudiating the works that they had purportedly been retained to preserve?


It was true—and there was more, the rebels yelled. They thought they would have the microphones in their hand all day and all of the night. They imagined that teaching Milton with an earring in one ear would never cease to fascinate the world.


But it did. The media—most inconstant of lovers—came and the media went, and the academy was left with its cultural authority in tatters. How could it be otherwise? The news outlets sell one thing above all else, and that is not so much the news as it is newness. What one buys when one buys a daily paper, what one purchases when one purchases a magazine, is the hypothesis that what is going on right now is amazing, unprecedented, stunning. Or at least worthy of intense concentration. What has happened in the past is of correspondingly less interest. In fact, it may be of barely any interest at all. Those who represented the claims of the past should never have imagined that the apostles of newness would give them a fair hearing, or a fair rendering, either.


Now the kids who were kids when the Western canon went on trial and received summary justice are working the levers of culture. They are the editors and the reviewers and the arts writers and the ones who interview the novelists and the poets (to the degree that anyone interviews the poets). Though the arts interest them, though they read this and they read that—there is one thing that makes them very nervous indeed about what they do. They are not comfortable with judgments of quality. They are not at ease with "the whole evaluation thing."


They may sense that Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience are in some manner more valuable, more worth pondering, more worth preserving than The Simpsons. They may sense as much. But they do not have the terminology to explain why. They never heard the arguments. The professors who should have been providing the arguments when the No More Western Culture marches were going on never made a significant peep. They never quoted Matthew Arnold on the best that's been thought and said—that would have been embarrassing. They never quoted Emerson on the right use of reading—that might have been silly. (It's to inspire.) They never told their students how Wordsworth had saved Mill's life by restoring to him his ability to feel. They never showed why difficult pleasures might be superior to easy ones. They never even cited Wilde on the value of pure and simple literary pleasure.


The academy failed and continues to fail to answer the question of value, or even to echo the best of the existing answers. But entertainment culture suffers no such difficulty. Its rationale is simple, clear, potent: The products of the culture industry are good because they make you feel good. They produce immediate and readily perceptible pleasure. Beat that, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Touch it if you can, Emily Dickinson.


So the arbiters of culture—our former students—went the logical way. They said: If it makes you feel good, it must be good. If Stephen King and John Grisham bring pleasure, why then, let us applaud them. Let's give them awards. Let's break down the walls of the old clubs and colleges and give them entry forthwith. The only really important question to pose about a novel by Stephen King, we now know, is whether it offers a vintage draught of the Stephen King experience. Does it deliver the spine-shaking chills of great King efforts past? Is the mayhem cranked to the desirable degree? Do homebody sadist and ordinary masochist get what they want and need from the product?

Mark Edmundson
On the uses of a liberal education

I don't know what to make of the author yet. I've been trying to find a positive defense of the Western intellectual tradition by him, and his criteria for judging whether a book is a part of the "Western canon."

Why Read?
Under the Covers By Jonathan Yardley

Classical Liberal Arts Academy (link from a comment to Mr. Hargrave's post)

Overview