Education Renaissance

Fire of Liberty
As I see various stories and books on the nature of academia and its assortment of classes in which professors yack on and on about their pet-peeves, the evils of the United States, how almost every minority are all victims of white males but in reality provide college attendees little or no academic worth. What's amazing to me is the fact some of the greatest colleges and universities of America seem to be garnering all sorts of accolades for their academics but in reality kids attending these vaunted institutions graduate with little or no knowledge of history, art, philosophy, literature, and economics compared to what students learned some thirty or forty years ago. While folks can dismiss my argument as being just more conservative hyperbole against academia, they should realize that we diminish our hold on Western values and reason in general the more we stray away from history, literature and philosophy.

If we are ever going to ensure that future generations of this nation will receive a well rounded education within our centers of higher learning then we have to guide the boat away from the shores of nuttiness and back into the deep waters of humanities and history. Thankfully, places like Harvard seem to still allow a certain amount of sanity to exist within its ivied walls. According to a recent column by Suzanne Fields, Harvard Press seems to find the time to publish some 20 volumes on the ideas and works on the various writers, philosophers and artists of the Italian Renaissance showing that academia of yesteryear has so much more to teach our young men and women than the current dreck they are learning today. Take a look at what Mrs. Fields had to note about these lights in the darkness of what is deemed higher education:

What's astonishing in these revived texts is how they testify to the changes in attitudes toward what we should learn. The humanist writers saw the study of art and literature as necessary for teaching virtue and building character. In that sense they were "useful," essential to the critical thinking that produces the wisdom for the whole of society.

They remind the reader of how precious a book can be, an appreciation that is swiftly evaporating in the age of the Internet. Printing books was once a labor of love, literally. Cosimo de' Medici, the rich ruler of Florence, hired 45 scribes who completed 200 volumes in 22 months. "Gold, silver, gems, fine raiment, a marble palace . . . such things as these give one nothing more than a mute and superficial pleasure," wrote Petrarch. "Books delight us through and through, they converse with us, they give us good advice; they become living and lively companions to us."

Petrarch might have been writing about politically correct professors when he observed that the more educated men become, the more aggressively perverse they become. It was more important to Petrarch to be a man of character than a learned man. "If You [cq] choose to grant me nothing else," he prays, "let it at least be my portion to be a good man. . . . If learning alone is granted us, it puffs up and ruins and does not edify."

If parents are going to pay a king's ransom for their child's education then they should at least have the confidence that their children are learning something meaningful. My best advice is that you should seek out these and other books on history, literature, art, and philosophy rather than wait on your professors(You still have some that offer good advice but not as many as you think) to offer any suggestions.