The Fifty-thousand dollar orgasm and Northwestern University

Prager: This is from their NWU's Human sexuality class. You can graduate NWU without ever having read a line of Shakespeare, but you can get credit for a live sex show.

This is the problem I have with most modern education, the garbage they consider important and the important stuff they've dismissed as garbage.

The decline in modern education didn't begin in the Sixties, though most people think it does. I know in the Twenties a new generation of people calling themselves "Progressives" took over the educational establishment and immediately set to changing the definition of the word. Reaching all the way back to Rousseau, they decided that education should be "child-centered", which is to say, the child's own relationship with his world will determine what his education should consist of.

Thus, a little child's world being little, his educational experiences at this young age will be little ones. He will study his clothing and his family and his pets. Since he's never heard of George Washington, he won't study anything about George Washington. Eventually by the Forties, under the title "expanding horizons", this became enshrined by the educrats as curriculum dogma and every enlightened Teacher's College taught it as the only humane way to educate children.

Not only was George Washington banished from the "social studies" books, but so were the Greek gods and goddesses, the legends of King Arthur and his knights, Robin Hood, Orlando, the Swamp Fox, David and Goliath, and every other hero your grandparents loved and you yourself have never heard of. But for some reason, even though great Western stories were banned, the great non-Western stories were pushed into the curriculum, even though 99% of the students had never heard of them. Anansi, Genji, Siddhartha all will pop into the reading lists. Now, I'm all in favor of adding these to the curriculum, but not when our whiny educrats were busy ripping Western culture out.

It needn't be an either-or issue. In fact it never was. "We only have time to teach 125 historical figures, so we'll throw out these 45 Westerners and add these 45 non-western figures" was NEVER part of the debate. And this is where the hippies got their way as the new Progressives. With them it was much more a matter of, "We've been pushing Western culture down the throats of blacks, Mexicans, Oriental* kids, even the white kids are choking on it. It's good to get rid of so much Western culture** which was seen as a throwback to those evil old patriarchal societies. And thus, we are genuine geniuses because only a real genius could be so enlightened.

There were other Western things on the disposal list. Western lit, for one. On yahoo! answers back in 2010 I posted a question about the "classics" of literature and virtually none of the people who post there, neither students nor teachers, could identify a classic work of literature outside the usual seven: The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, Animal Farm, and that racist manifesto, Huckleberry Finn. Out they all went, good riddance! And did we replace them? Well, I'm positive children only read a few books each year now, instead of the dozen they used to read. They don't read poetry and they never memorize it. They barely touch plays, though they'll likely read one by Shakespeare (which is now available in sissified English) and maybe "Our Town" or "Death of a Salesman".

*Yes, back then it was still "Oriental", not the very stupid "Asian" substitute.

**They actually denied and still deny the existence of American culture, much less the value of a kid who belongs to the West actually learning about the West. Color became the be-all of culture. If your skin was very dark, you were an "African" child. If your skin was olive, you were Latino and of course in both cases you'd only be interested in learning about Aztec gods or Congolese farming practices. Never mind that your ancestors came from Spain and Uruguay, or were Ethiopian Jews. And thus the hippies disproved their own case about ancestry determining who you are--but don't let that stop you.

Gone are Music theory, Music appreciation, Art history, Art practicum (drawing and painting used to be taught, and yes, they are teachable subjects, contrary to what the disciples of Rousseau preached), history (unless it's history of a part of the world you have nothing to do with), and even "western" math (math based on facts instead of feelings) is being done away with.

You've heard the usual complaints about what has taken the place of these subjects. "Self esteem" and "conflict resolution" are huge among the flakes controlling the curriculum. Yet no one feels that self esteem can be taught in a classroom except by being given challenges that the student has to overcome, which has also been removed from the classroom. "To challenge" has become synonymous with "to pressurize" and pressure is bad. We replaced it with "cooperative groups", since cooperation is a virtue and competition is bad. Now the groups of four students meet together, the three who don't know what they're doing leave all the work to the one bright kid and do nothing. This is not a good thing for our children.

And this is why you'll find courses like "Human Sexuality" at so expensive a college as Northwestern University. What strikes me as dumb about that one is that if left to their own devices these students would learn about human sexuality awfully well on their own. It's not as if there were a shortage of information out there. It seems that it's important to offer it as a "subject" so that some teacher can impart "the right values" to the students. Sorry but that's a mainstay of the educrat establishment, making sure that the students get the right values taught to them.