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Quote by: syracusa I have posted this in the "School sucks" thread but it is what I would respond to your post too.
<<Education is not supposed to serve only the pragmatic purposes of "building" something material in a given society. Education is also supposed to help people relate to each other, make sense of each other and their own lives - in other words to give some level of cohesiveness to a society. This is where general knwoledge (the so-called liberal arts) steps in.
It is the shooting down of the liberal arts in education that led to the narcissistic culture Americans live in today. Void and sad creatures, eternally focused on their own image, their own successes and egotistical pleasures, mentally and emotionally detached from others, including members of their own families - which in the end leaves them as empty and unfulfilled as when they started the "self-obssession" journey.
I have lived and traveled in several different cultures but nowhere have I seen such a joyless, sad society as in the US - despite the shiny yet so superficial image of civility, prosperity and that vacuous smile perpetually engraved on people's faces.
I am firmly convinced that the steady dumbing down of the education in this country, the demise of general knowledge and the transformation of women into "she-men" courtesy liberal feminism - is what is responsible for the general sadness and dehumanization of the contemporary American culture.>> |
You said that very well. I wish more US citizens could spend time outside the US and get a boarder understanding of the world, so when they looked at there own culture they would see what is missing. How did you come to the conclusion that public education changed our culture?
Several years ago, we announced a national youth crisis, and I knew public education had been changed, so I became researching the history of education, Germany because we have imitated Germany in significant ways, and democracy since it was concieved in Athens, and my grandmother's generation of teachers were defending democracy in the classroom. I wanted to know what it meant to defend democracy in the classroom and became collecting old text and education books.
I became aware of how the Prussians centralized education and changed the culture of Germany when reading old books about Germany, but I think the problem is much worse in the US than it was in Germany. This possibility sure is worth exploring. I am quoting from the 1915 book, and a 1943 book "Is Germany Incurable? by Richard M. Brickner, M.D. explains how what was started by the Prussians became cultural paranoia.
1915 "The Anglo-German Problem} by Charles Sarolea
"The Southern and Western German is still today, as he was in the days of Madame de Stael, artistic and poetic, brilliant and imaginative; a lover of song and music. The Prussian remains as he has always been, inartistic and dull and unromantic. Prussia has not produced one of the great composers who are the pride of the German race; and Berlin, with all its wealth and its two million inhabitants, strike the foreigner as one of the most commonplace capitals of the civilized world. The Southern and Western German is gay and genial, courteous and expansive; the Prussian is sullen, reserved, and aggressive. The Southern and Western German is sentimental and generous; the Prussian is sour and dour, and believes in hard fact. The southern and Western German is an idealist; the Prussian is a realist and materialist, a stern rationalist, who always keeps his eye on the main chance. The Southern and Western German is independent almost to the verge of anarchism; he has a strong individuality; his patriotism is municipal and parochial; he is attached to his little city, to its peculiarities and local customs; the Prussian is imitative, docile, and disciplined; his patriotism is not the sentimental love of the native city, but the abstract loyalty to the State. The Southern and Western German is proud of his romantic history, of his ancient culture; the Prussian has no culture to be proud of-politically he is an upstart. Prussia is a settlement, an arm;y, and a bureaucracy rather than a nation; but the Prussian is unswervingly loyal to the commander of that army, submissive to the chief of that Bureaucracy.
How shall we explain this startling paradox? How is it, and why is it, that the artistic and exuberant, genial and sentimental German submits to the hard rule of the commonplace, uninteresting, and dour Prussian?"