The Decline of Teaching Western Civilization
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ESSAY EXERCISES IN UNREALITY THE DECLINE OF TEACHING WESTERN CIVILIZATION Anthony Esolen here’s a chilling image from my youth hungry and snuffling in the rain and mud at T that I’ve never been able to scrub out of Woodstock, but to be a child was like being my mind. It might not seem at first glance perched at a high window of a riverside house, to amount to much. It was a blue spiral watching the waters rise and lap at a bridge spray-painted on our street, a sort of insect beginning to tilt and crack. Perhaps those with enormous eyes, with a caption sug- of my generation who were nine or ten years gesting LSD. In those days, the newspapers older than I can indulge themselves in rosy were filled with war and rumors of worse memories of it all, if they were not dragooned than war—of the wholesale collapse of the into the fever swamps of Indochina: of porn social order. It was when the Students for flicks suddenly advertised in the newspapers a Democratic Society engaged in their vio- as cutting-edge, hip, hot from Sweden; of lent demonstration against that inoffensive, Christians chucking their prayer books into old-fashioned liberal Hubert Humphrey a bonfire of pieties; of the suddenly promi- at the Democratic National Convention in nent evils of divorce and child murder; of Chicago. “Off the pigs,” cried the Black Pan- music made by drug-addled geniuses, the thers, whose tongues were not in their cheeks music of loneliness, lust, rage, foolish hope, when they said it; rather their thumbs were and wickedness. My family was strong and ready to cock their pistols if any “pig” of a my backcountry coal town was not entirely policeman were to get in their way. insane. Still, my memories are not rosy. I don’t know that it was very heaven to be I had no idea then that the college class- young in those days, wallowing naked and room was its own sewage spillway, over- Anthony Esolen is professor of English at Providence College and a senior editor of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity. His books include Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Books), The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, and most recently Life Under Compulsion (ISI Books). modernagejournal.com 29 MODERN AGE SUMMER 2016 flowing into the quads—or perhaps the sew- not wait to give us all his answer: truth was age flowed in the other direction. It hardly only what could be ascertained by empirical matters. At age nine I could see through the observation and measurement. That meant stupidities of the New Math: set theory for that only the hard sciences could rest upon children, rather like teaching toddlers how their foundations. Every other building to talk by drawing blueprints of the oral could be commandeered by the politicians, cavity, or how to walk by naming the bones or blown to bits. and muscles in their legs. Long before I read And that is what the young politicians Orwell I could perceive that most new things did. They began to turn arts and letters into were empty and that the higher the diction instruments of politics, or to blow them that people used to name them and describe to bits. Thus the demand that literature be them, the emptier or more sinister they were. “relevant.” Homer is relevant to me because Call it Esolen’s Law of the Distributive Prop- Homer is relevant to man. But once you erty of Stultification over Tradition. deny that there are stable truths to be learned What I could not see was that the stu- about man by studying his history, his phi- pidity came from on high, and that college losophy, and his art, what is left for Homer education lay in the balance. My parents but to be adopted by a few curious souls who graduated near the top of their classes in happen to like him, or to be drafted into high school. Like most Americans, they con- the New Model Army? And there are nearer sidered college education as something of a ways to go to burn down buildings than by dream—college was a place of intelligence, struggling over Homeric verbs. So in a few profound learning, some risible pride, and short years, centuries of learning were merely venerable tradition. Gaudeamus igitur! My tossed aside. The central pier cracked, the mother could not have known that she was bridge buckled, and the waters came crash- more likely to study Latin in her little town ing through. than were the college students at Berkeley. None of us knew who John Dewey t Brown University, an ambitious stu- was. But there was a nice line to be drawn A dent and political player named Ira between that man and the people, both Magaziner positioned himself as the only professors and students, who went down to person who could negotiate between the the bridges in rafts to help the floodwaters black students, who were demanding change, do their work. Dewey was classically trained and a feckless administration. That adminis- but would have none of it for the ordinary tration essentially allowed Mr. Magaziner to democratic masses. He had no use for the rewrite the whole curriculum. Since those useless things—that is, the best and noblest who know little—and we are talking here things: no use for poetry, flights of imagina- about a very young man—are more adept tion, beauty, religion, and tradition. He was at suggesting grand vagaries than delving a hidebound innovator. His children and into the specifics of a learning they have not grandchildren in the 1960s had been well mastered, the result was predictable. Brown trained in his democratic scorn. Out with University dumped its curriculum over- the notion that the academy is not a place board. Forget the classics. There is nothing for political recruitment, precisely because that the university considers necessary for an it is to be devoted to the truth. “What is educated person to know. It is all a cafeteria. truth?” said the serious Dewey, and he could This, that, the other: what difference does 30 modernagejournal.com EXERCISES IN UNREALITY it make? Magaziner would go on to meddle When the Irish arrived here, they found in national politics, writing up the national that they were no more welcome than if health insurance plan with which Hillary they had landed in Liverpool; but they did Clinton, in her incarnation as copresident, find work. Some of them hacked away at crashed and burned. the mountains where I was born, digging up It would be pleasant to learn that there was the glossy black diamonds, chunks of high- a lot of determined resistance to the new ’n’ quality anthracite coal. Others went to the improved curricula, those that replaced “All cities, where they slaved in foundries and Gaul is divided into three parts” with rap mills by day and often got blind drunk by sessions and The Prophet. In particular, it night. Patrick Harkins went to the factories would warm my Roman Catholic heart with of Boston. In 1845 he and his wife had a gratitude to find that her prelates and princi- son, Matthew Harkins, whom they sent to pals and college presidents saw through the the public Boston Latin School, which still chaos and said, “We at least will preserve the exists, and which still teaches Latin, though humane learning that these self-professed not with quite the old passion and intensity. humanists have discarded.” But the pressure The young Harkins pursued his studies at of the new proved too great, so that Catho- the College of the Holy Cross and then went lic schools now find themselves in the odd abroad to complete his doctorate in divinity, position of having to recover their religious at the English college in Douai, France. He identity by first recovering their human iden- was ordained a priest at Saint-Sulpice. He tity. The old protesters knew who Tennyson had added French and Italian to his linguis- was and were perfectly willing to pelt the old tic repertoire, so that when he returned to prude with mockery. My students now have New England, he was in good position to never even heard the name of Tennyson. The minister to French-Canadian, Italian, and old protesters knew who Milton was and Portuguese immigrants. were perfectly willing to enlist his Satan in In 1887 Pope Leo XIII appointed him the ranks of their heroes. My students have bishop of Providence, where he exerted his heard a little bit about Satan, and nothing considerable powers until his death in 1921. about Milton. He tripled the number of parishes in the diocese, especially building churches for par- t least in one place, though, there was ticular ethnic groups. The church my family A resistance. It requires a little bit of his- attends now, Sacred Heart, in West War- tory to explain why it came about, because wick, is an Italian church a hundred yards in a way that history is repeating itself now. away from Saint Joseph’s, the Irish church, During the terrible potato famine in Ire- and a mile away from Saint Jean-Baptiste, land, many families pooled their shillings, the French church, and Saint Anthony’s, the which were few enough, to send one likely Portuguese church. Harkins did not encour- lad alone on a boat to America to find a bet- age separatism. That was not the point. He ter life, perhaps to make enough of a living valued each ethnic group, and he understood so that eventually his brothers and sisters that families speaking the same language might join him.