Both worshipping and villainizing the West does our students—and our societies—a disservice.
On the issue of “Western civilization,” I would like to, in pursuit of fairness and truth, say something that offends everyone. As the American writer Walker Percy once joked, “What else can you do when some of your allies give you as big a pain as your opponents?”
I should have credence in this arena. I’ve been a student or professor of great books for more than two decades. I’ve taught in classical Christian schools. And I have investigated the history of ideas and the sources of a great tradition for just as long. With passion and conviction, I can say that the great books are among the best resources for virtue formation in education.
Yet as much as I support the great books, I do not support the partisan game between conservatives and liberals, elitists and popularizers, those who believe the Western canon should be lionized and those who believe it should be destroyed.
On one side, American defenders of “Western civilization” want to pass down the heritage that influenced the founders of the nation and that is part of a contemporary student’s cultural legacy. C.S. Lewis offers this analogy: “If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said.” Students who don’t learn the foundations of the Western world—from Homer to Herodotus—are liable to be unmoored from the ideals that form that world today.
Read full article at the Dispatch