Originally posted by whodey
I speak Prog:
Translation: .....need to be atheist, left winged, and arrogant.
Following a Papal Edict of 1277, the universities in Europe (notably Paris and Oxford) were firmly controlled by theologians and the Church. In Oxford through the middle of the 19th Century, it was still impossible for a catholic or dissenter from the established Anglican church to study at Oxford. This had the result that many leading philosophers and scientists functioned quite outside the university system and, indeed, forward thinking people were in favour of abolishing universities as useless establishments protecting the privilige of an aristocratic elite.
This situation was tranformed first in Prussia in about 1810, when academics led by names like Kant, Fichte and Hegel overthrew the establishment of their era and placed philosophy and science in the lead, which transformed every topic, including history and literary criticism.
Although this is perceived as secularising education, it was not acccomplished through any support for secularism as such, but rather through the irreconcilable conflicts between diverse religious camps - in England for example, it was really about the demands of dissenters and Catholics - and also the dissatisfaction with aristocratic privilige in all aspects of public services, notably the armed forces. Many of the leading voices demanding change came from modest economic backgrounds. In England, for example the leading academics were often the sons of evangelical parsons.
Universities established in Europe and later in the USA and beyond, the concept of academic freedom. The point of academic freedom was not to attack religion, but to attack privilige and dogmatism. (After all, how many of the raging Christian voices on this site wish to be subjected to the dogmatic control of the Roman Catholic Church?)
However, there were always alternative voices preferring to promote education as utilitarian and vocational, a machine for generating certificates of qualification which could, then , be controlled by the elite. The impact of such trends has been seen in other cultures, notably in China with its incredible history of selection on merit through an examination system. It reduces education to mechanistic "scholasticism," an entirely conservative environment in which the emphasis is on mastery of tradition, not creativity nor the solving of new problems. As education becomes identified with economic opportunity, so too the pressure to obtain qualifications grows, the market for providing them grows, and grade inflation produces a wash of qualified graduates without the slghtest capacity for original thinking. This approach sees education as a mind control device, training up each generation of drones in conformity with the model of thought preferred by the elite. China has at times been awash with candidates for qualifications but with no jobs available just as, say, Italy in the early 20th century was awash with law graduates far beyond any possible demand, because that was the limited focus of the education system.
The reaction against academic standards is reactionary and appeals to a mob mentality in the interests of the elite. This is not always unreasonable in itself, because whatever way we find to promote meritocracy will inevitably fall into the hands of the wealthy and the powerful. By manipulating fee structures and costs the American and British systems are working hard to confine educational opportunity to the very wealthy and to exclude the rest. What is unreasonable is the inability to separate out the real issues (privilige and fairness, but also dogmatism versus academic freedom) from the diversionary issues (e.g. confusing secularism and atheism).
If you respect intellectual honesty then that carries with it the burden of seeking to defend and promote your own ideas in a competitive marketplace for ideas. "when you care about truth, you cannot also be concerned about who is right." At times, this is creative and it does not have to be seen as existentially ruinous. The evidence already shows us that religion has not disappeared from the world in the face of modern science. It is time to check out are these voices of fear driving the anti-intellectual fundamentalism of our age.
Stanford Rejects Western Civilization Class 6- 1
13 Apr '16 23:50
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