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Today's New Site: Right Shelf
By Erick Posted in Culture | Featured Stories — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
A lot of you have requested, along with a number of contributors, a place to showcase good reviews of good books. We've listened and we have created Right Shelf, a site dedicated to conservative reviews of good and great books.
For those of you in the publishing world, we're happy to review your books. For those of you looking for good summer reading or gearing up for a Labor Day beach trip, this is the place you'll want to go.
The problem I have with all this is that a university environment should be first of all about the pursuit of truth.
On the tower at the University of Texas, from which I was blessed to graduate, is printed: "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." That should be the guiding principle of a university education.
I will go to my grave believing that the best possible education a man can receive is a traditional, classical liberal arts education: grammar, logic, rhetoric, literature, mathematics, science, and art. But that curriculum went the way of all things decades ago.
When Stanford dumped the Great Books program, which formed the basis of every university curriculum, it established the precedence for the mish-mash that passes for education today.
Not long after that, grammar was replaced by "whole language learning," logic was replaced by emotion, rhetoric was replaced by grievance (especially ethnic grievance), literature was replaced by pulp, mathematics was replaced by "new math," science was replaced by pseudoscience, and art was replaced by smut.
We see the results of this devaluation of education all around us today, in the coarsening of our culture, the degradation of our language, and the poisoning of our politics. Would that it were not so, but it is.
I'm all for academic freedom. I remain steadfastly oppossed to academic politicization, whether from the left or the right. The truth makes no distinction between left and right, liberal and conservative; it only distinguishes between true and false. Without such a distinction, we will never be free.