Frommer's Travel Guides this past month voted Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S.A., where I live and work, "The Best Place To Live In America." As home to the University of Virginia and as the crucible for American democracy - Thomas Jefferson's well-preserved Monticello estate is here, and the Marquis de Lafayette's French troops gleefully ambushed British Army ammunition convoys on what is now the downtown mall's main street during the American Revolution - there is much to support this contention. Many are the "old money" aristocratic families who have resided here since the 1700s, and their children go to University of Virginia to acquire the polish and skills in preparation to assume their mantle of leadership in tomorrow's America. In many respects, it is a microcosm of the very best of that which America has to offer to create future achievers.
Yet, what I discovered is unnerving. What college education in the liberal arts has warped into since the late Sixties purge of classical studies from our campuses provides material evidence that, at least for now, our schools are not arming youth with the ability to think critically. This especially applies to the social sciences, literature, philosophy, and the ethics of medicine, law and the "hard" sciences.
Having had the opportunity to attend several dinners and cocktail parties frequented by University of Virginia professors and junior academics, it was my personal trauma to be exposed first-hand to Israel bashing (which I think is too frivolous a term: these guides and teachers of children offhandedly promote the destruction of the State of Israel. As they supported the dissolution of apartheid in South Africa, these instructors are actively promoting a fraudulent moral equivalency between these two wildly different circumstances) by those who are entrusted to mentor future politicians and "world shakers" here in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
On balance, the university-type of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel "dialogue" - "dialogue" is what they call it - is very much a mirror image of the pseudoscience of "racial theory" promoted by Alfred Rosenberg in Nazi Germany amongst academics during the Third Reich to validate the Fuhrer. However, rather than "single-issuing" their illogic, the New Academics have constructed an entire pink castle of anti-logic and philosophy in the sky to support their deliberately anti-rational, subjectivist and ethnocentric mode of anti-reason. It is a new form of "discourse" (their term) which makes of Orwell's NewSpeak in 1984 a relatively lucid and rational way of conducting intellectual business.
In effect, parents of students are paying $30,000 per year for their offspring to be lobotomized.
Whence comes this attitude, but from how core curricula are developed? These "principles" of instruction are formally propagated at teachers' conferences, just as the "Fuhrer principle" was carved in marble. Sadly, this process sees it equivalent also in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, and this process of anti-matriculation and the deliberate defenestration of the capacity to think is spelled out magnificently in an article in the London Daily Telegraph.
The main tenets of this belief system are as follows, admirably expressed by the Campus Watch website:
* The non-Jew, non-Christian is never to blame for his or her actions.
* Nationalism is okay, but only if the nationalists are not Christian or Jewish.
* War - it is always the Christians' or the Jews' fault if the non-Jews and non-Christians make errors. Even terrorism is okay, just as long as the terrorists are not Christians, Jews or anti-Socialists.
* Islamists are always free to do what they want; if they do anything wrong, it is the fault of the rich Christian or Jewish people.
* All evil and misery in this world is the product of rich, Christian or Jewish, heterosexual men.
* Jews, Christians and anti-Islamists shall shut up and behave if they want to continue their sorrowful existences, otherwise they shall be exterminated.
Particularly contested is the issue of Israel's right to exist as the Jewish homeland. This has made for several amusing exchanges between me and other dinner guests, the drift of which was that if the Jews must "return" their land to the Arabs, complete with their houses and possessions, then there should be no dissenting argument were I to call the British Embassy to indicate that several Virginia millionaires' estates are to be surrendered immediately to Her Majesty's government, as those lands were illegally expropriated from their Tory owners by those evil American revolutionaries George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and General Baron von Steuben.
The most idiotic argument was that Israel's forces were draconian, in the wrong and cruel because they had succeeded in killing more Arab terrorists than the Arab terrorists had killed Jews (this, from a Ph.D. with an MD certification in anesthesiology). I replied that if there were any better definition of the term "victory" on the part of the IDF, I would be pleased to hear it.
I provide yet another, last revelation of the logical absurdities of dealing with today's educators in America. A Ph.D. director of a technical educational institute launched into the standard tirade about how men exclude women from pursuing engineering and scientific studies through strategies of discouragement and systematic exclusion, before which tirade I remained silent. Following that, she changed the subject and proceeded to inquire of every able-bodied man at the cocktail party if any of them would be willing to change the fan-belt on her car, as it was squeaking and bound to fail soon.
I refuse to teach. Under threat of death, I will not stand before a classroom and hold forth. A more fruitful and more promising undertaking would be bailing out the sea with a teaspoon. In the meantime, I fail to see why Israel's government need pay the slightest attention to the advisement of the U.S. government. If those politicians and diplomatic personnel are a product of the U.S. educational system, it should be a "given" that one is dealing with meshugganehs.
Yet, what I discovered is unnerving. What college education in the liberal arts has warped into since the late Sixties purge of classical studies from our campuses provides material evidence that, at least for now, our schools are not arming youth with the ability to think critically. This especially applies to the social sciences, literature, philosophy, and the ethics of medicine, law and the "hard" sciences.
Having had the opportunity to attend several dinners and cocktail parties frequented by University of Virginia professors and junior academics, it was my personal trauma to be exposed first-hand to Israel bashing (which I think is too frivolous a term: these guides and teachers of children offhandedly promote the destruction of the State of Israel. As they supported the dissolution of apartheid in South Africa, these instructors are actively promoting a fraudulent moral equivalency between these two wildly different circumstances) by those who are entrusted to mentor future politicians and "world shakers" here in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
On balance, the university-type of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel "dialogue" - "dialogue" is what they call it - is very much a mirror image of the pseudoscience of "racial theory" promoted by Alfred Rosenberg in Nazi Germany amongst academics during the Third Reich to validate the Fuhrer. However, rather than "single-issuing" their illogic, the New Academics have constructed an entire pink castle of anti-logic and philosophy in the sky to support their deliberately anti-rational, subjectivist and ethnocentric mode of anti-reason. It is a new form of "discourse" (their term) which makes of Orwell's NewSpeak in 1984 a relatively lucid and rational way of conducting intellectual business.
In effect, parents of students are paying $30,000 per year for their offspring to be lobotomized.
Whence comes this attitude, but from how core curricula are developed? These "principles" of instruction are formally propagated at teachers' conferences, just as the "Fuhrer principle" was carved in marble. Sadly, this process sees it equivalent also in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, and this process of anti-matriculation and the deliberate defenestration of the capacity to think is spelled out magnificently in an article in the London Daily Telegraph.
The main tenets of this belief system are as follows, admirably expressed by the Campus Watch website:
* The non-Jew, non-Christian is never to blame for his or her actions.
* Nationalism is okay, but only if the nationalists are not Christian or Jewish.
* War - it is always the Christians' or the Jews' fault if the non-Jews and non-Christians make errors. Even terrorism is okay, just as long as the terrorists are not Christians, Jews or anti-Socialists.
* Islamists are always free to do what they want; if they do anything wrong, it is the fault of the rich Christian or Jewish people.
* All evil and misery in this world is the product of rich, Christian or Jewish, heterosexual men.
* Jews, Christians and anti-Islamists shall shut up and behave if they want to continue their sorrowful existences, otherwise they shall be exterminated.
Particularly contested is the issue of Israel's right to exist as the Jewish homeland. This has made for several amusing exchanges between me and other dinner guests, the drift of which was that if the Jews must "return" their land to the Arabs, complete with their houses and possessions, then there should be no dissenting argument were I to call the British Embassy to indicate that several Virginia millionaires' estates are to be surrendered immediately to Her Majesty's government, as those lands were illegally expropriated from their Tory owners by those evil American revolutionaries George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and General Baron von Steuben.
The most idiotic argument was that Israel's forces were draconian, in the wrong and cruel because they had succeeded in killing more Arab terrorists than the Arab terrorists had killed Jews (this, from a Ph.D. with an MD certification in anesthesiology). I replied that if there were any better definition of the term "victory" on the part of the IDF, I would be pleased to hear it.
I provide yet another, last revelation of the logical absurdities of dealing with today's educators in America. A Ph.D. director of a technical educational institute launched into the standard tirade about how men exclude women from pursuing engineering and scientific studies through strategies of discouragement and systematic exclusion, before which tirade I remained silent. Following that, she changed the subject and proceeded to inquire of every able-bodied man at the cocktail party if any of them would be willing to change the fan-belt on her car, as it was squeaking and bound to fail soon.
I refuse to teach. Under threat of death, I will not stand before a classroom and hold forth. A more fruitful and more promising undertaking would be bailing out the sea with a teaspoon. In the meantime, I fail to see why Israel's government need pay the slightest attention to the advisement of the U.S. government. If those politicians and diplomatic personnel are a product of the U.S. educational system, it should be a "given" that one is dealing with meshugganehs.