ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE. Here’s some stuff I wrote a while ago about dissent and the study of history: “Today there are all kinds of creeds that teach us that …[s]tudents do not need “fifth-century eyes,” because the Western past is irrelevant to them. Although they attend a Western university, and therefore in some sense must be within the Western tradition, they deride theories of education which emphasize that tradition as outdated at best and racist at worst. Dido of Carthage and Augustine of Hippo are irrelevant because they’re different from us—their cities are gone and their bones are dust. At a rally last year to reform Yale’s curriculum, a student held up a sign reading, ‘MY EDUCATION SHOULD REFLECT MY EXPERIENCE.’ This is a direct attack on difference, on the notion that an education ought to make us greater than just an accumulation of our experiences. If we already know everything that needs knowing, if our experience gives us sufficient help in understanding the world, why read anything at all? Du Bois and de Beauvoir fail the experience test too, even if Socrates fails it more spectacularly.

“It’s odd that this stance claims to be a critical one. In removing the encounter with unassailable difference which education ought to provide, we remove any grounds for evaluating the present day. If students don’t have “fifth-century eyes” or their equivalent, the only other option is twentieth-century eyes. Without a knowledge of the alternatives, and a knowledge of how we got where we are, our criticism of American democracy, capitalism or anything else must necessarily be without basis. Any arguments we make will be irresponsible because they are uninformed.”

Full article, which I like a lot, is here.