The New Criterion

A Special Symposium on Education

May 2008

“We all know, well enough, what a good liberal education looks like, just as we all know, well enough, what makes for a healthy society. It really isn't that complicated. It doesn't take a lot of money or sophistication. What it does require is patience, candidness, and courage, moral virtues that are in short supply wherever political correctness reigns triumphant.”

—Roger Kimball, from “What was a liberal education?”

The May 2008 issue of The New Criterion features a special section on the state of American education with contributions by six celebrated social critics. Roger Kimball introduces the series of essays, arguing that the degradation of education is inseparable from a larger cultural degradation. Alan Charles Kors explores the legacy of 1960s academia, the perversion of concepts such as diversity and tolerance, and the lemming-like academic and social behavior of students indoctrinated by groupthink. Robert L. Paquette describes how the activist, politically correct faculty at Hamilton College sought to sabotage a new center for the study of “freedom, democracy, and capitalism,” forcing it off-campus and depriving it of college recognition. Victor Davis Hanson examines the decline of the classics, which has become a victim of overspecialization, vocationalism, and a widespread drop in intellectual standards and critical discrimination. James Piereson exposes the manner in which politically liberal conceptions have now replaced traditional humanistic ideals in defining both the form and substance of the American university, leaving “a generation of undergraduates intellectually adrift in a sea of nihilism, relativism, and political correctness.” Finally, Charles Murray steps back to explore what he calls “educational romanticism,” the egalitarian myth—and educational pathology—that nearly all children who are not doing well in school have the potential do much better and that “no child need be left behind.”

With its unsentimental look at the state of education, the May 2008 issue of The New Criterion will be a wake-up call for anyone concerned about the intellectual health of our nation, and our children.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:

Victor Davis Hanson is the author of many books, most recently A War Like No Other (Random House). Alan Charles Kors is professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder of FIRE, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Roger Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals (Ivan R. Dee), is co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion. Charles Murray, the prolific author, is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Robert L. Paquette teaches in the Department of History at Hamilton College. James Piereson is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author, most recently, of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter Books).

The New Criterion, a review of culture and the arts, is published monthly from September through June by The Foundation for Cultural Review in New York City and is edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer. Named in homage to T.S. Eliot’s Criterion magazine, The New Criterion is now in its 26th year. The Times Literary Supplement called The New Criterion, “probably more consistently worth reading than any other magazine in English.”

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 4, 2008 8:32 AM