The Immorality of Education

In the 21st Century

by Dr. Michael Hill

"All that education can do in any case is to teach us to make good use of what we are; if we are nothing to begin with, no amount of education can do us any good." - John Gould Fletcher

At one time in the not too distant past, the objective of higher education was the nurture of something M.E. Bradford called '"humane learning." At the core of humane learning lives the idea that one will ultimately learn not only about the world in general, but about one's own place in it. In other words, the properly educated student will develop a balanced character as a result of being taught the particulars about his own place and kin and not simply rootless abstractions such as the universal rights of man, global democracy, and equality.  Humane education, then, should bring out something that already exists in man: a reverence for his own kind. As John Gould Fletcher wrote in his essay, "Education, Past and Present" from the Southern Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand, “All that education can do in any case is to teach us to make good use of what we are; if we are nothing to begin with, no amount of education can do us any good."

TRADITIONAL SOUTHERN EDUCATION THEN...

Before the Northeast forcibly imposed its own nationalistic educational system on the entire country after The War to Prevent Southern Independence, the South's schools and colleges were on the whole more humane and tolerant, in the true sense of the word, than their Northern counterparts. Northern institutions, characterized by a meddlesome Unitarian-Universalist strain, produced iconoclasts who reveled in destroying traditional social norms in the name of "progress." Based on the classical model Southern schools, by contrast, produced men of good character who ensured the continuation of a stable, conservative society.

... AND NOW

Traditionally, the South never bought into the nonsense that all persons are equally educable. Those in academia would do well to remember that Thomas Jefferson championed educating only "those persons whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue." Yet today our schools and colleges have substituted quantity for quality and consequently turn out hordes of graduates woefully deficient in the fundamental skills of reading, writing, and ciphering. In the spirit of Alexander Pope, who believed "A little learning is a dangerous thing," Dr. Robert Lewis Dabney predicted our current educational dilemma: "the common schools will have created a numerous 'public' of readers one-quarter or one-tenth cultivated: and the sure result will be the production for their use of a false, shallow, socialist literature, science, and theology infinitely worse than blank ignorance."
But perhaps we should not be too surprised at this turn of events. In a society polarized between an internationally-oriented American ruling class and a regionally-oriented populism, it serves the interest of the former to see that the latter is miseducated. If this can be done to larger and larger numbers of the populists' children, then so much the better for the elite.

ANTI-SOUTHERN EDUCATION

As one who took his terminal degree at a public Southern state university and spent nearly twenty years teaching there, I have witnessed first-hand the contemptible and immoral campaign to make Southern children into deracinated, interchangeable cogs for the New World Utopia to come. As a college or university freshman, our unwitting student is given what Donald Davidson calls "the beginnings of a [proper] social perspective and a social philosophy." For the young man or woman in the Deep South, more often than not this means being taught to reject his own place and kin. For example, a professor of Southern Literature at the University of Alabama once told her students that every time they saw a white-columned mansion it should remind them of how evil their ancestors were. I asked her if she had ever considered assigning John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn or Stark Young's So Red the Rose to balance her politically-correct, anti-South reading list. She replied matter-of-factly that she was not interested in presenting a balanced view of what to her was a despicable culture and civilization.

THINK GLOBALLY- DESTROY LOCALITIES

Unfortunately for us traditionalists, this situation is the rule and not the exception these days, especially in the humanities and liberal arts. What Davidson termed "desirable cultural attitudes" largely means taking the "world approach” to literature and history espoused by leftists such as our professor friend at Alabama. A planetary consciousness captured in the banal bumper-sticker philosophy, "Think globally-act locally," is replacing the local and regional consciousness that once -provided a beginning point of reference for Americans from all parts of the country. The Pennsylvania steel mill worker and the north Alabama plowboy both have local and family traditions that are studiously left uncultivated in today's global classroom.

THE ALIEN INVASION

The intrusion of alien professors pushing an alien worldview into Southern classrooms unfortunately has had the most telling effect on our colleges and universities. Not only do we find our historic symbols and traditions sacrificed to the gods of political correctness, but our classrooms have become hot-houses of anti-Southern propaganda. A Carpetbag and Scalawag professor intimidates the student who dares to defend his region rand its heroes, or the junior faculty member who might present something other than the current Marxist orthodoxy. It is all but impossible nowadays to find a course in Southern history taught by a patriotic Southerner because his superiors think him incapable of teaching the subject in an unbiased fashion. No one seems to give much consideration to the potential bias held by a liberal New Englander or Midwesterner. It strains credibility to imagine the situation reversed: a traditional, conservative Southern professor lecturing the students at Harvard or Yale on the moral deficiencies of their Yankee ancestors.

After all, the history of the South is much too important to be left to Southerners. If that were done the minds of the young down here might be corrupted with fables such as The War was not caused primarily by slavery or that the South's position on States' Rights and secession corresponded faithfully to the Founding Fathers' ideas. Generations of Southern boys and girls might be taught that Lincoln was not really the Great Emancipator and saviour of the Union but rather a vile, ambitious politician, the tool of Northern plutocrats intent on subverting the Constitution to destroy Southern economic competitiveness and to colonize the region and steal its abundant resources, all under the mask of "preserving the Union." In other words, if traditional Southerners are left in charge of teaching history and literature in their own region, then the myth of a glorious democratic Union, purchased with the blood of blue-clad saints and crowned by the martyrdom of Father Abraham, will be exposed as the big lie that it is.

In reality, we have an American Empire sired by the forebears of those who now dominate our cultural and educational institutions. We cannot expect them to permit the truth to be taught to the descendants of those who were branded "rebels" for defending the principles of the Old American Republic. Sadly, this is the heart of the immorality of what passes for education in the 21st century South. 

- Dr. Michael Hill is President of the League of the
South as well as a noted author and historian