Encouraged to Discover

From the article “The Moral Contortions of the New University” by Justin Smith, in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

I believe that students, for the sake of their own thriving as human beings, should be required to study at university only things that have nothing to do with their own life up until that point. Curricula should not be made to be “relatable.” Students should be encouraged rather to discover and cultivate relations to ideas, values, and traditions they had not previously known to exist.

He was talking specifically about education, but I would expand the scope.  I think the survival of the Western world depends on it.

We are now a multiracial, multilingual, multicultural country, and that’s never going to change.  We have to find a way to get along with each other.  That means we all have to learn more, know more, accept more.

If this degenerates into a cultural struggle for dominance, we’re going to tear our world apart and be left with nothing.

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You can read his whole article HERE, at Chronicle.com, but let me warn you: that site is a nightmare.  It kept blocking the content and telling me to turn off my ad-blocker, which would have been fair enough had I been using one.

I was not.

You’ve got about three seconds before it blanks the screen, and in that time you can hit CTRL-A to select everything and CRTL-C to copy everything.  Then paste it into Notebook or a word processor to read it.

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• Posted in: Current Events
• Tagged: Current Events