Philip Salzman, professor emeritus of anthropology at McGill University, wrote Monday (April 19) that North American campuses are now awash in far-left so-called “awakening” ideology, and that racial and gender hatred has been brought into schools in a way that has completely overturned traditional values. Liberal arts education in universities is no longer a serious academic discipline, but a commitment to lying, with only the hard sciences, engineering and mathematics retaining some academic content.
A translation of Salzman’s article follows.
As I experienced at Antioch College in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the purpose of a liberal arts education is to open students’ eyes to the intellectual life of Western culture.
Students were asked to consider the following questions: “What makes a good life?” , “How do people’s thoughts and actions differ with place and time?” , “What is the basis of social life?” , “Do people have free will or is their fate already determined?” , “Where does wealth come from?” , “How does science differ from other belief systems?” , “What is beauty?” , “Who will rule?” and many other questions related to literature, language, and science.
Liberal arts education relies on academic values from the Enlightenment, namely openness in the search for truth, the selection of people based on their talents, and academic freedom in the plurality of ideas. As Gad Saad put it, these values are grounded in “the defining spirit of the West, a strong commitment to the pursuit of truth. Both merit-based selection and freedom of intellectual diversity are structural conditions for the search for truth, as both are necessary for fruitful exchange and competition in the field of ideas.
Over the past forty years, liberal arts education has been abolished and is now dead. Postmodernism has killed the concept of “truth” by claiming that all knowledge is subjective and that each person has “my own truth. Critical theory gives decisive and ultimate answers to social and political questions based on Marx’s theory of class struggle, creatively modifying race, gender and sexual orientation as oppressed and victimized. Feminists discarded Western culture and civilization as the patriarchal product of the “damned white man. They also abandoned Goodbye Homer and Shakespeare and all Western literature, Bach and Beethoven and all Western music (except for Clara Schumann), Rembrandt and Renoir and all Western painting. Except, of course, for Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt.
Racists opposed the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as the product of “slave masters,” while the country as a whole was seen as “systematically racist. The New York Times, once a serious newspaper, claimed that America was based on slavery and had always been racist against blacks, and nothing more. The United States has been legally abolished. Canada, which was weaker on slavery, was considered strong on “colonialism” and was reduced to nothing. As we now know, a liberal arts education has always contributed to the lie of patriarchal and white supremacist oppression.
Neo-Marxist ideas of “social justice” answer all important questions, and not only are further inquiries superfluous, but any alternative view, criticism, or opposition is banned as “white supremacist” and “violent. ” because it targets “marginalized, racialized and underserved populations. And these people “feel insecure” and traumatized if they hear opinions that do not support “social justice” ideology. As a result, freedom of speech and academic freedom were completely eliminated. Diversity of thought and opinion was considered reactionary, fascist, Nazi, and evil.
What is taught in universities and university directed schools today is about overthrowing patriarchy and white supremacy, replacing men with women, and replacing white people with people of color, preferably transgender people of color. No longer do we need to ask all those obscure liberal arts questions because we now have all the noble answers. We know how society constitutes oppression, and how to reconfigure it into benignity. We know who deserves to be heard and emulated: women and people of color, and who must be marginalized: men and white people.
This replacement is done under the mantra of “diversity, equality and inclusion,” which is evident in the demographics of all universities. This meant fewer men and whites (except illegal aliens) and more women and people of color. Today, instead, men and whites are “underrepresented,” which is exactly what the “awakening” wants.
What choice do the children have?
With the Awakening’s anti-male and anti-white universities no longer offering a liberal arts education, what options do high school graduates have?
For decades, higher education has been seen as the path to economic and social success in North America. Parents made sacrifices to send their children to college. Even knowing how corrupt higher education has become, they are unwilling to deprive their offspring of the benefits they will receive upon graduation.
So, what can 90% of parents who are not Marxists, radical feminists, anti-white racists and science deniers do for their children?
Most importantly, don’t let your kids take “studies” classes on feminists, blacks, race, “Latinos,” cool kids, transgender people, and whatever new “victims” they come up with next. “. Unless you want your children to learn about race and gender hatred, hatred of nations and hatred of Western civilization, and want them to have careers in fast food restaurants and coffee shops, avoid these “awakening” courses.
In the social sciences, anthropology, sociology and political science, once serious academic disciplines, are now devoted to lying, for example, that blacks are more likely to die by police than by the black criminals who actually take most of their lives. Statistical differences are evidence of discrimination, not of different preferences and abilities, and that men can become women and women can become men.
The humanities are much the same and should be avoided. Don’t assume that English departments still teach English literature. They don’t indulge in teaching only “damn white people”. English departments are now all about “waking up” to cultural studies, which may explain why enrollment is plummeting. History has now become “people’s” history, with a particular focus on the “oppressed. Enrollment rates have also plummeted. Even language courses are no longer about language instruction, but about “social justice”. Social sciences and humanities are avoided as much as possible.
It may be hard to believe, but education and social work have become more radical. Colleges of education are committed to bringing racial and gender hatred into schools.
Only the hard sciences, engineering and math retain some academic content, although the departments themselves struggle with the demands of “diversity, equity and inclusion”. Therefore, STEM is the only direction worthy of your child’s study. Oh, but not biology, which has been eliminated by transgender radicals and their society-wide promoters, and if you believe in biology, your child will be eliminated.
There is another option: higher education in technical disciplines, at polytechnics such as the British Columbia Institute of Technology in Vancouver, the Manitoba Institute of Trade and Technology, Algonquin College in Ottawa, and Dawson College in Montreal. In the United States, there are numerous polytechnics, such as Caltech and MIT.
The wisdom once sought in the liberal arts must now be sought elsewhere.
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