{"id":47674,"date":"2015-11-18T05:10:07","date_gmt":"2015-11-18T05:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=47674"},"modified":"2015-11-18T14:04:12","modified_gmt":"2015-11-18T14:04:12","slug":"americas-anti-agoge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=47674","title":{"rendered":"America’s Anti-Agoge"},"content":{"rendered":"

[by Mark Safranski<\/strong>, a.k.a. “zen<\/strong>“]<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“….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.”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

– Xenophon, The Polity of the Lacedaemonians<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Be quiet!<\/em> 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\u00a0not<\/em> about creating an intellectual space! It is not!\u201d
\n– <\/em>Jerelyn Luther, the Shrieker of Yale
\n<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

“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.”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

– Brenda Smith-Lezama, Vice President of the Missouri Students Association\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Much has been written this week of the protests at Mizzou<\/strong> and Yale<\/strong> universities <\/a>now sparking more absurd <\/a>copycats elsewhere.\u00a0 Pundits have covered<\/a> the dangerous illiberalism of campus political correctness<\/a> and speculated that the students\u00a0are the result of\u00a0a generation of helicopter parenting<\/a>. There were earlier\u00a0essays recently\u00a0on the “coddled” nature of elite university students<\/a>\u00a0generally and skewered Ivy League students in particular as the\u00a0products of a deeply flawed, intellectually shallow,”meritocratic” rat race that<\/a> serves as the\u00a0gateway to the nation’s elite. There have also been\u00a0conservative suggestions that the students lack the maturity to vote <\/a>and a furious counterattack by\u00a0social-justice faction\u00a0lefties defending<\/a> the<\/a> students and their authoritarian\u00a0anti-free speech<\/a> “safe space<\/a>” ideology.<\/p>\n

While all interesting and moderately important, I don’t think any of this gets to the heart of the matter.<\/p>\n

Up until today, every society in history has had a process, formal or informal, to prepare the next generation of leadership and inculcate virtues<\/strong><\/a> in them that would assure their society’s cultural continuity\u00a0and physical\u00a0survival. The ancient Chinese mandarinate<\/a><\/strong> was based on\u00a0mastery of Confucian<\/strong> classics; the\u00a0British Empire<\/strong> had its public schools<\/strong><\/a> and storied regiments\u00a0where the sons of the gentry and peerage\u00a0bonded; the samurai and daimyo of Tokugawa Japan<\/strong><\/a> continued to uphold bushido<\/strong><\/a> and\u00a0cherish antique tactics in\u00a0warfare centuries after Japan’s<\/strong> unification made such things more ritual than reality.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0definitive example of an educational rite of passage from student to member of the\u00a0ruling class however, remains the Agoge<\/strong><\/a> of ancient\u00a0Sparta<\/a><\/strong>. Established, according to Spartan legend, by the semi-mythical law-giver Lycurgus<\/strong><\/a>, the agoge<\/strong> (“the upbringing”)\u00a0existed to mold Spartan boys through a ferocious training regime into the hoplite\u00a0soldier-citizens who comprised the social apex of Sparta’s militaristic oligarchy. The agoge ceaselessly battered the students <\/a>with physical exertion, corporal punishment, exposure to the elements and hunger in a bid to harden them\u00a0 in mind and body. There’s much about life under the agoge that moderns, even admirers of classical Greece, would find distasteful or even appalling, but it was very\u00a0effective at inculcating that ascetic toughness, communal discipline, martial prowess and laconic wit that Spartans prized.\u00a0 For at least\u00a0three centuries, the agoge helped sustain Sparta’s qualitative military edge and its hegemony over the Greek world and subsequently, its\u00a0political independence for two centuries more. Not a record that was frequently matched in history.<\/p>\n

America too has a system of education to prepare – or rather, certify – our future business, academic, judicial\u00a0and political leaders based on matriculation at a small number of highly selective, elite universities and liberal arts colleges. Broadly speaking, this includes roughly the top 100 higher education institutions ranked by US News & World Report<\/strong> and narrowly, for filling the very top tiers of finance, law and government service, the Ivy League<\/strong> plus a handful of comparable schools. This would place Mizzou at the bottom of the barrel of our elite education system\u00a0while Yale is at the very pinnacle. The kids going\u00a0to exclusive, elite, universities\u00a0are\u00a0very bright for the most part, but even more so they are wealthy.<\/p>\n

This upper class status includes the campus protestors screaming loudest about their wretched oppression. The hunger striker of Mizzou’s father is a multi-multi-millionaire while the Shrieker of Yale reportedly comes from the relative poverty of her parents $750,000 home<\/a>. The\u00a0aggressive\u00a0authoritarianism on display at Yale,\u00a0Mizzou, Amherst, Dartmouth<\/strong>\u00a0or Claremont<\/strong>\u00a0is less the “Rage of a Privileged Class<\/a>” than the petulant tantrum of the 1%.\u00a0 In other words, despite their heroic efforts at a public pathos orgy of political correctness to portray themselves as victims in grave danger as they bullied and assaulted professors other students, these are spoiled rich kids used to getting their way, pitching an unholy\u00a0fit to get undeserved power over others who disagree.<\/p>\n

However obnoxious and unlikable these petty tyrants are or how totalitarian their demands to end free speech and academic freedom<\/a>, fire and expel all\u00a0their critics\u00a0or put social-justice commissars in charge of every university department, they didn’t educate themselves. The students\u00a0embody, perhaps in a more militant form, what they were taught.\u00a0The problem isn’t that this year has a random\u00a0surplus of student radicals, or that sinister racist conspiracies exist in the administrations of\u00a0our most left-wing universities as protestors claim or that these helicoptered students are all\u00a0psychologically fragile waifs raised in a culture of self-love and psychodrama. No, the problem is that the system to educate our future leaders tends to inculcate deep hostility and loathing toward their fellow Americans, extolls anti-empirical, witch-hunting dogmatism as a virtue\u00a0while rewarding narcissism and anti-social aggression\u00a0in interpersonal relations.<\/strong> <\/em>This needs to change.<\/p>\n

We have built an American anti-Agoge<\/strong> that cultivates values, ethics\u00a0and habits\u00a0in\u00a0future leaders\u00a0that are politically repulsive in their authoritarian rejection of Constitutional rights\u00a0and are antithetical to ruling wisely or well. At times they would seem to conflict with\u00a0a life as\u00a0a functionally competent human being. Half of all Yale students <\/a> in this pressure-cooker <\/a>require at least some\u00a0mental health counseling. This is an astounding statistic. Imagine if\u00a0Polybius<\/strong> or Livy<\/strong> had written that half of the sons of the Patrician class were at least slightly mad. A toxic ruling class that is certain that they have been victimized by the citizens they govern and who lack the normal resilience to withstand minor stresses of life without concocting conspiracy theories or taking to their bed is a recipe for disaster. In a liberal democratic state such as ours, dependent as it is on the values of an open society to function politically,\u00a0this state of affairs is\u00a0a\u00a0sign of political decay and creeping oligarchy.<\/p>\n

What is to be done?<\/p>\n

We did not arrive at this juncture overnight and fixing\u00a0a fundamentally broken academic culture\u00a0will take time, but here are a few simple suggestions to start.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Legislation to Secure Academic Freedom, Due Process\u00a0and Free Speech on Campus<\/strong>:\u00a0 This will defang the PC bullies, social justice warriors and their allies in university administration by hamstringing their ability to coerce and punish dissent. Obviously, this will be easier in public universities but these provisions could be attached to receiving Federal funds, including guaranteed student loans.<\/li>\n
  2. Draconian Reduction of University Administrative Positions relative to Tenured Faculty<\/strong>: This will save a great deal of\u00a0money better spent elsewhere in by axing bureaucracy\u00a0while de-funding and disempowering the diversity commissariat on campus that is the source of much illiberal mischief. Again, this is a matter more for state level action initially.<\/li>\n
  3. Restore a Core Undergraduate Canon rooted in Real Courses in Real Academic Fields: <\/strong>This will\u00a0reduce\u00a0the Melissa Click problem of academic sinecures for full-time radical political activists posing as professors with Fifty Shades of Gray “scholarship”. The money saved by getting rid of an army of administrators in #2\u00a0leaves a lot of room to hire mathematicians, biologists, historians, economists, physicists, philosophers and linguists\u00a0who earned a doctorate in something real.<\/li>\n
  4. Require Elite universities Receiving Federal Funds to allocate 20% of their Student Body to Students from Middle-Class, Lower Middle Class and Working Class backgrounds, Geographically Balanced:<\/strong> I have mixed feelings about this in principle, but it would definitely\u00a0break up the overwhelming\u00a0UC-UMC Superzip<\/a> monoculture at our gateway institutions and bring new talent and perspectives into our ruling class that the university administrators at present work\u00a0extremely hard to systematically exclude. It will also increase social mobility and provide competition for the progeny of our game-rigging “meritocratic” elite<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    .<\/p>\n

    None of these will usher in a utopia. Much of radical academia will muddle through doing what they have been doing until retirement, but the system itself will be on a trajectory for better health rather than for getting steadily worse.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    [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! […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[680,360,216,361,974,575,215,865,132,34,525,1088,483,279,260,492,187,381,318],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fail","category-21st-century","category-academia","category-america","category-authoritarian","category-character","category-culture","category-diversity","category-dystopia","category-education","category-epistemology","category-ethics","category-extremists","category-free-speech","category-freedom","category-leadership","category-politics","category-society","category-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47674"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47794,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47674\/revisions\/47794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}