@hightor,
hightor wrote:
Interesting piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Quote:
....
But something more needs to happen, and soon. All of us liberals involved in higher education need to take a long look in the mirror and ask ourselves how we contributed to putting the country in this situation. We need to accept our share of responsibility. Anyone involved in Republican politics will tell you that our campus follies, magnified by Fox News, mobilize their base like few things do. But our responsibility extends beyond feeding the right-wing media by tolerating attempts to control speech, limit debate, stigmatize and bully conservatives, as well as encouraging a culture of complaint that strikes people outside our privileged circles as comically trivial. We have distorted the liberal message to such a degree that it has become unrecognizable.
(...)
Conservatives are right: Our colleges, from bottom to top, are mainly run by liberals, and teaching has a liberal tilt. But they are wrong to infer that students are therefore being turned into an effective left-wing political force. The liberal pedagogy of our time, focused as it is on identity, is actually a depoliticizing force. It has made our children more tolerant of others than certainly my generation was, which is a very good thing. But by undermining the universal democratic we on which solidarity can be built, duty instilled, and action inspired, it is unmaking rather than making citizens. In the end this approach just strengthens all the atomizing forces that dominate our age.
Interesting commentary, however it involves some serious sophistry in suggesting (in the 2nd para.) that the liberal pedagogy, focused on identity, is either a depoliticizing force, or encourages children and students to become more tolerant. The somewhat contrived rationalization that follows appears to concede the harm done but, evades the central point. We are all members of the same society and economy. and presumably citizens of the same country. However the contemporary emphasis on group values does indeed reduce or eliminate tolerance for different views and individual judgments of others based on their observed actions, as opposed to their group identities. Bad actions on the behalf of favored identities are ignored or excused , while any actions on the part of members of disfavored groups is condemned based on their group identities. This is the antithesis of either tolerance or real liberalism. It has overtones of the Cultural revolution in China a generation ago,
