(Oct. 6) The anniversary of Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel provides a good opportunity for someone to launch a nationwide campus tour to insult college students.
Well, not really to insult them, but to tell them the truth, which too many of them will consider to be derogatory. Sometimes, the truth hurts.
OK, let’s back up. What spurs these thoughts are two published articles in the past week, one here at the Washington Examiner and one in the Atlantic. The first, by Johns Hopkins University political science professor Benjamin Ginsberg, is called “Why so many students hate Israel.” The second, which predated the first but nonetheless partially answers it, is called “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” Written by the magazine’s assistant editor, Rose Horowitch, the Atlantic article details the experiences of veteran professors at top universities who say their students have trouble handling even half the reading the professors formerly assigned. “Many students,” she reports, “no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books.”
The two trends clearly are connected. “As every professor can attest,” writes Ginsberg in these pages, “the average student’s capacity to think critically is hampered by a lack of knowledge.” Both Ginsberg and Horowitch report that grade schools and high schools are woefully deficient at demanding enough of students and at imparting knowledge of basic history. Ginsberg adds that much of the history they do teach involves left-wing, “moralistic cues … that seemed to direct students toward viewing American history in an emotional manner, as a string of injustices.” Not just American history: by extension, that of the entire cultural West.
Combine that with the pathetically short attention span of most of today’s students — partly a result of the smartphone world, partly a result of outlandishly unrigorous and misguided reading standards pushed nationwide by the Common Core initiative, and partly resulting from widespread lack of discipline — and voila, we now have a whole age cohort that can’t or won’t engage in “sustained immersion in a text.”
When students can’t sustain deep reading, when they are taught that the West is benighted, and when they are taught to feel rather than use critical thinking skills, that’s an obvious recipe for ignorant bouts of emoting against Israel. Which is, of course, what began happening almost immediately after the Hamas attacks last Oct. 7, even before Israel actually had embarked upon its righteous counter-assault….. [The full column is here.]
