The rising generation of leaders knows next to nothing about the great thinkers who have shaped our history. Who can blame them? They have been educated during the Great Forgetting. We have embarked on a remarkable experiment: a society governed by those who have little knowledge of the humanities, which means no informed sense of who we are and where we’ve come from.
In a review of a book by Doug Stokes, Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West, Charlie Bentley-Astor makes telling observations about her recent undergraduate education at Cambridge University. “I took an undergraduate degree in English but, by the end of the three-year course, I had not studied Milton or Coleridge, Wordsworth or Shelley, nor Keats or Collins or Dickens. These writers were replaced by black, female, and ‘queer’ writers, often for no other reason than that they are black or female or queer.” Student activists at Cambridge dictated terms to supine university staff. They had the library reorganized. “Foucault takes pride of place on the top floor, whilst Chaucer and Shakespeare have been relegated to the basement.”
It’s a story that could be told by countless others. During the last three decades, most universities in the English-speaking world have pivoted away from required classes in the literary canon and Western civilization. [...]
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