Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia. A very smart human.

I have read many articles by by Camille Paglia who has been writing for Salon Magazine  for many years.

I lot of what she says I agree with, a lot I don't. Not that it matters.

That being said, she commented on America's universities in a recent interview, part of which I post here:

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I prophesied this in a piece I wrote in 1992 for the Times Literary Supplement called “The Nursery-School Campus”.  At the time, nobody understood what I was saying.  But I was arguing that the obsessive focus by American academe with students’ emotional well-being was not what European universities have ever been concerned with. European universities don’t have this consumer-oriented view that they have to make their students enjoy themselves and feel good about themselves, with everything driven by self-esteem. Now we have people emerging with Ivy League degrees who have no idea how little they know about history or literature.  Their minds are shockingly untrained. They’ve been treated as fragile emotional beings throughout their schooling.  The situation is worsening year by year, as teachers have to watch what they say and give trigger warnings, because God forbid that American students should have to confront the brutal realities of human life.

Meanwhile, while all of this nursery-school enabling is going on, we have the entire world veering towards ISIS–with barbaric decapitations and gay guys being thrown off roofs and stoned to death.  All the harsh realities of human history are erupting, and this young generation is going to be utterly unprepared to deal with it. The nation is eventually going to be endangered by the inability of several generations of young people to make political decisions about a real world that they do not understand. The primitive realities of human life are exploding out there!

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Scary stuff, and most probably very true. Particularly the part about how " this young generation is going to be utterly unprepared to deal with it."

The entire article is posted at Salon. In my view, it is worth reading, and should be required reading for those who think everything is just fine. Unfortunately, those "shockingly untrained" minds would most likely laugh it all off as dissonant babble. 

Until the bottom falls out.

And even when that happens, they will still have no clue as to what happened, or why.