Losing the Big Picture

"Still, the overall prospect is discouraging. Most of the English departments of our leading
colleges show a greatly diminished interest in familiarizing undergraduates with the Anglo-
American literary heritage. This is especially worrisome in an age when television and the
Internet lessen the likelihood of students entering college with much knowledge of literature.
Many of these programs’ graduates—though no doubt priding themselves on having received a
first-class literary education—must actually possess only the most rudimentary knowledge of
English literature’s longer history and its greatest writers and works. What they have instead is
premature specialization, dubious theoretical insights, and a familiarity with trendy writers of
approved identity and outlook who are likely soon to fade from view."

This is an excellent study of the decline of Western Culture [Translation: Culture based upon a world-view strongly influenced by Christianity] in the literature classes of major universities. The result is half-educated graduates who are ill-informed about the nature of American institutions, law, freedom, and religion, preparing them for deconstruction and cultural anarchy. I am not a conspiratist. I think it is more the result of moral laziness on the part of educational institutions to stand up to the fringe lunacies of feminism, gay studies, and other half-baked and historically rejected frothy ideas and world-views. The problem is partly that today's half-educated graduates know a great deal about their bodies, their feelings, their self-esteem, and the faults of the West, and very little about the giant achievements, which that take for granted, included the institutions that they attend. "A little learning is a dangerous thing," someone said, and they probably don't know who, either thinking it comes from the Bible, from Shakespeare or from Ozzie Osbourne.

You will need Adobe Reader to access the file from the link above. BTW, the National Association of Scholars [NAS] publishes a journal which is very well written and addresses the intellectual decline brought about by feminism and the other "isms" of the trendy scene.