The disappearance of authentic liberal education in our pedagogic and didactic systems in America from the highest level down portends the demise of our democracy. Arnold Toynbee, a noted historian in the mid-20th century, in a very explicit reference to the existential threat to democracy by poor education in particular, comments that in 22 prior human civilizations, 19 had ceased to exist by committing moral suicide: Civilizations dying by apathy and slow assassination by enemies from within, perpetrated amazingly against many citizens who, because of their poor education, know little or nothing about the duties and virtues of free people in a democratic society, and have merely become objects of propaganda and demagoguery.
Clearly our educational system lies at the heart of crises and problems today, forged in ideological fires by the secular liberal milieu of elitists, espoused by many American teachers, supported by scientism, atheism, and materialism, and manifested in brazen self-interested political beliefs. Bereft of a solid education, the citizens of our country are intellectually unable to articulate any opinions of truth that would counter these secular ideas, that would point out the inaccuracies and lies hidden within the cloak of venomous mendacities that secular liberals espoused. We called them “progressive” and “modern” and allowed so-called “intellectual elites” to determine the future of our posterity without resistance because we were handicapped by poor education and manipulated by an increasingly ugly and corrupt culture where truth and morality don’t exist and where the deviant is normalized and the normal is identified as deviant, bigoted, racist, intolerant, and divisively to be denied opportunity to speak.
Without a renaissance in thinking and education we have entered a New Dark Ages brought on by a new “barbarism” where ignorance is bliss, art has degenerated into entertainment and celebrity, culture had become neo-pagan, decadent and totalitarian, and citizens are totally unaware of the imminent destruction of our democracy. Bad education is the harbinger of doom for family, society, and democracy.
We are now dominated by a system of beliefs, attitudes, and values that are identified as “PC” — Political Correctness. The aim is to impose a uniformity of thought and behavior totalitarian in nature. Early 1900s cultural Marxism identifies culture, rather than economy, as the place for class struggle. Their Critical Theory recognized traditional American beliefs, that is the whole existing culture and social structure of society, needed to be destroyed and replaced by new thinking as the necessary pathway to provide for a socialist revolution. PC stigmatizes dissenters to these new values — destroying freedom of speech and free inquiry. Badly educated people are easily seduced by utopian allures of socialism, reduced to objects of propaganda for the new cultural elite, and become “vegetable beneficiaries.”
Cultural Marxism, secular liberalism, and democratic socialism share an extensive influence in education because American colleges and universities are the largest resource of Marxism and socialism anywhere in the world. What’s missing in cultural Marxist secularism is the book-burning but is made up for in fascist, hateful radical groups on campus and off, who are allowed to challenge, without dispute, the great ideas of the of the Western tradition on the grounds of ethnocentrism, phallocentrism, and simply as works not as “good” or as relevant in socialist history.
The charges against the Western tradition are entirely groundless under examination by reason, logic and history. But this presupposes that there are men and women who are literate in the great ideas and can actively make these arguments against the baseless, unreasonable, illogical, and malicious cultural Marxists and illiterate secular liberal sycophants. But the literate voices have gone silent!
Paul Lambert lives in Leominster.
