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 aliasinkhorn rated 4 months ago - Aesthetics have been degraded, and consumers, patrons and dilettantes praise the resulting rubbish. The plastic arts have no grace or detail, and poetry is open verse because poets can't write in meter and can't rhyme. Music has no harmonics and melody is a cripple. No one labors over thei...
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3 Reviews
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- tbc rated 3 months ago
- From the page: "Since radical egalitarianism, not truth, is the primary mission of the university, details, of whether Ward Churchill ever had a Ph.D. or was a Native American, or whether the Duke lacrosse players were innocent, or whether the integrity of a campus chapel was worthy of respect, mean little."I like that quote, but the paper says much more.HT: Arts & Letters Daily
- aliasinkhorn rated 4 months ago
- Aesthetics have been degraded, and consumers, patrons and dilettantes praise the resulting rubbish. The plastic arts have no grace or detail, and poetry is open verse because poets can't write in meter and can't rhyme. Music has no harmonics and melody is a cripple. No one labors over their work. No one has learned how to deeply think. No one is interested in learning from those from the past. The greatest minds and the lessons of human history are abandoned. My points are extreme, but the reality is extreme, and this article, in my view, explains why.
The new learning that failed
On the value of classical learning.
From the page: Why, then, the decline of the university? In large part, many trends have emerged over the last half century that share a common trait in their antitheses to classical education and the spirit of the Western life and letters.
Traditional liberal arts education assumed that there was a difference between popular culturefilms, television, hit music, cartoons, comics, slang, and pulp fictionand university learning in at least three areas. First, there used to be an appreciation that a few seminal works of art and literature had weathered fad and cant and, by general agreement, due to their aesthetics or insight, or both, spoke universally to the human condition. The evolution in the character of Achilles in the Iliad or the plight of the Melians in Thucydides history explored human dilemmas that innately appealed to the readerbut in a manner of sophistication, depth, and beauty not offered by a sit-com or comic book.
Second, there was the old assumption that professors, through long training, were necessary to guide students through such classic texts. Dantes Inferno is a difficult poem that can best be elucidated to students by someone who knows Italian, or who has studied Renaissance Italy, or is acquainted with the intricacies of Florentine culture and politics. In contrast, a Stephen King novel is accessible to almost anyone without prerequisite knowledge or help.
Third, there was an appreciation of a manner of formal thought and beauty that separated some high art and literature from more popular and accessible counterparts. But once the university destroyed this divide by introducing popular culture into the curriculum and its purveyors onto the faculty, then there was no distinction made between readily accessible information and singular works that required effort and care to appreciate their value.
- Sileno rated 4 months ago
- "The new learning that failed" by Victor Davis Hanson
From the page: "To suggest that a student or colleague is beautiful or ugly, even in private conversation, can be grounds for dismissal. There is no vocabulary left to convey ugliness or near perfection in art or literature--at least none that is not instantly deconstructed to prejudices of race, gender, and class. In a university class, we read mostly poems without meter, rhyme, musicality, or an elevated vocabulary, and novels without heroes or protagonists or even much action; we view art that is far removed from what the eye sees or would wish to see. The result is that our students cannot recognize beautiful things around them or within themselves."
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