Notre Dame Prof: Our Schools are Committing ‘Civilizational Suicide’
by Daniel Lattier, Intellectual Takeout:
Dr. Patrick Deneen has taught in some of America’s finest universities. He has been a professor at Princeton, Georgetown, and is now in the political science department at Notre Dame.
So what’s his assessment of America’s best students?
“My students are know-nothings.”
In an extremely important essay posted to Minding the Campus titled “How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture,” Deneen further describes his students:
“They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.”
Deneen accurately diagnoses the problem: that schools today no longer seek to initiate students into a particular tradition, their tradition:
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
