At the beginning of a new year, it’s hard to avoid the question: where are we going? What will our future be like? Does America, does freedom, does Western civilization even have a future?
I date my career as a professional writer to an op-ed I published in the Los Angeles Times in the early 1980s. I was a graduate student in English and was also teaching undergraduate composition courses. One of the challenges I faced in the classroom was this: when, in a search for possible topics for my students to write about, I brought up things that I thought of as falling under the category of general knowledge, I found over and over again that most of my students didn’t know what I was talking about. They didn’t know history. Their knowledge of politics, geography, art, and literature was, at best, extremely spotty.
Yes, a few of them were very well informed about some sport or other, or about this or that singer or rock group or actor or TV show, but there was not much overlap between one kid’s knowledge and another’s. There was, in fact, hardly any knowledge that they all shared – and these were students at what was considered a pretty decent college. So I wrote a piece about it.
Thirty years later, the situation is, by all accounts, even worse than it was then – not just in America, but across the Western world. And the problem isn’t just that they don’t know who wrote War and Peace. It’s that they don’t know basic things that could mean the difference in the future between war and peace, poverty and wealth, slavery and freedom.
THE INTELLECTUAL DEATH OF THE WEST.
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