America’s Anti-Agoge
[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]
“….Instead of softening their feet with shoe or sandal, his rule was to make them hardy through going barefoot. This habit, if practiced, would, as he believed, enable them to scale heights more easily and clamber down precipices with less danger.”
– Xenophon, The Polity of the Lacedaemonians
“Be quiet! In your position, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman! Then why the fuck did you accept the position? Who the fuck hired you? You should step down! If that is what you think of being headmaster, you should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not!”
– Jerelyn Luther, the Shrieker of Yale
“I personally am tired of hearing that first amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here.”
– Brenda Smith-Lezama, Vice President of the Missouri Students Association
Much has been written this week of the protests at Mizzou and Yale universities now sparking more absurd copycats elsewhere. Pundits have covered the dangerous illiberalism of campus political correctness and speculated that the students are the result of a generation of helicopter parenting. There were earlier essays recently on the “coddled” nature of elite university students generally and skewered Ivy League students in particular as the products of a deeply flawed, intellectually shallow,”meritocratic” rat race that serves as the gateway to the nation’s elite. There have also been conservative suggestions that the students lack the maturity to vote and a furious counterattack by social-justice faction lefties defending the students and their authoritarian anti-free speech “safe space” ideology.
While all interesting and moderately important, I don’t think any of this gets to the heart of the matter.
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