Beating back political correctness in the English Dept.

"It’s official: you spend tens of thousands of dollars to send your kids to college. In return, the colleges turn out graduates who are more ignorant than when they enrolled.

According to a recent report from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, seniors at Yale, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and several other top schools actually know less about American history and government than entering freshmen.

But students don’t just learn (or unlearn, as the case may be) facts in college. They also learn attitudes and principles. In other words, they form their characters—which, Aristotle pointed out more than 2,000 years ago, means learning to love and delight in certain things and spurn others. For example, American students used to learn more from the Gettysburg address than just the facts of Civil War military history. They also learned to love self-government—and its necessary condition, the courage and sacrifice of the patriotic soldier." Read on....