This article is shared from the Wall Street Journal.
It is a good article and it’s a shame it is the Wall Street Journal that is
publishing it and it’s a shame another major critic of this nonsense and a
constant critic of Kendi like John McWhorter and others like him who are not
right wing ideologues, are not given the option of publishing their views by
left wing media as opposed to the right forces that are opportunistically giving
voice to their views. Note added: The reader should recognize that the author is a former editor of the Wall Street Journal and a representative of US capitalism. I read these with a certain understanding and given some of the comments I have received not everyone does that. The point is that what capitalist commentators write in their journals is important. The way racism is being raised in the mainstream media and in academia and the response to it, one that does not unite workers but increases division, does not go unnoticed by them. Baker and others will opportunistically tap in to this as Trump did with great success. The extreme right wing legislation in some states is also a backlash to this approach. With no unifying response from the heads of organized labor or elsewhere that unifies working class people we can expect more gains for the right and critiques like this that will get an echo.
Richard Mellor
It’s more of a religion. Its practitioners reject the idea of evaluating the merits of competing ideas.
Wall Street Journal
By Gerard Baker
Pedestrians walk between Corpus Christi College and Merton College at University of Oxford, England, March 22, 2012.
I learned economics from a Marxist.
It was the height of the Cold War, a
critical moment when the survival of the West seemed in doubt, an age when many
people, even those under no illusions about the unfolding terror of Soviet
communism, wondered whether capitalism’s days might be numbered.
My tutor at a famous university in the English heartlands was one of the nation’s most prominent socialist intellectuals. His works anatomized—and anathematized—the capitalist system from the traditional Marxian perspective. His wider writings championed a structuralist view of society and its institutions. He not only inveighed against the supposed moral inferiority of capitalism. He was convinced about the inevitability of its collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
Marxist economist and Oxford Tutor Andrew Glyn. |
But Andrew Glyn was first and foremost a teacher, an intellectually insatiable pedagogue with a desire to foster among his students a hunger for a broad understanding of the discipline. His reading list each week included the canon of classical economic thought ( Adam Smith, David Hume, David Ricardo ), John Maynard Keynes and his followers, and a thorough grounding in the modern neoclassical and monetarist works (F.A. Hayek and the Chicago school, Milton Friedman especially).
No thinker—no ideology—was off-limits.
It was the early days of the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution. Neither seemed
guaranteed of success at the time, and we were encouraged—in fact required—both
to learn what they were doing and to understand dispassionately its
intellectual origins.
Glyn was also—unexpectedly for those of
us who thought communists were louche types with disdain for the protocols of
petit bourgeois society—a rigid disciplinarian. Woe betide you if you hadn’t
done the reading each week. Obliging attempts to blame our sloth on the
inherent class injustices of a medieval university system or the ennui induced
by late-stage capitalism would be greeted with a thin smile and a final
warning.
He believed—passionately—that his own
critique of the Western system was right. But he had no intention of forcing
his students onto a narrow intellectual path that would preclude the
possibility of our embracing alternatives.
This is the essence of a liberal
education: the nurturing and development of independent minds by erudite
teachers of various ideological persuasions through exposure to the widest
range of intellectual inquiry. It is what made England, and then America, the
greatest force for civilizational progress the world has known.
And it is in peril.
The crisis engulfing our institutions
represents the struggle for ascendancy of an ideology that is literally the
antithesis of the educational values that have driven the West’s unrivaled
economic, social and technological progress for the past few centuries.
Critical race theory—and its various
postmodern cousins—is not some interesting interpretation of social and
political history that we are free to examine, embrace or discard. Its
proponents do not seek to frame a critique of modern America to be tested
alongside alternatives.
They insist that a traditionally
liberal approach to evaluating the merits of competing ideas is itself an
outgrowth of an illegitimate system of oppression. Rejection of their critique
is the product of false consciousness, since critical thought is itself
invalid, the product of white male hegemony.
This isn’t really education at all, not
in the sense in which the term has been understood in the post-Enlightenment
era. It is closer to pre-Enlightenment religious instruction: the imparting of
doctrinal truth with the practical aim of saving souls and reordering the
world. Hence its migration from college campuses to K-12 schools, where its
practitioners expect to find supple and more-suggestible minds. They have taken
to heart the old Jesuit maxim about the first seven years of life.
There are encouraging signs that this
recent migration itself may be sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Parents
across the country and the political spectrum are vocally resisting. In local
elections voters have seized the opportunity to oust the ideologues pushing
this un-American extremism on their children.
Growing numbers of professionals,
however eager to display their progressive credentials, know that they owe much
of their success to a steeping in the canon of Western thought and are growing
uncomfortable with the idea that their children might now be taught that Ibram
X. Kendi has more to offer than John Locke or Jane Austen.
Most telling, the attempts by the ideology’s
defenders to redefine critical race theory suggest they know how indefensible
it is. Efforts by multiple states to restrain its spread have been falsely
characterized by journalists and progressives as attempts to stop children from
learning about slavery and segregation. When you have to disguise your own
ideology to purge it of its noxious core, you know you’re losing.
I learned economics from a Marxist. But
the most important thing he taught me was that open inquiry was the antidote to
ruinous extremism. It’s a lesson we may finally be relearning.
1 comment:
I think the author is setting up a straw man, particularly when it comes to primary and secondary school education. The fact is, conservative politicians are opposing any expansion of education to include other than a version of white Euro-American history that whitewashes slavery, labor exploitation, and imperialism, and calling what is simply inclusive and factual education "critical race theory."
While the author of this article may have a point (I don't know enough to critique it) I don't think the the politicians care what CRT means. It just sounds elitist and slamming it appeals to their base.
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