SOME GOOD NEWS ABOUT EDUCATION – AT 12:16 P.M. ET:  It's very rare, so cherish this piece by George Will.  Frame it.  Send it to friends.  From the Boston Herald: 

TEMPE, Ariz. — Encouraging developments are as welcome as they are rare in colleges and universities that cultivate diversity in everything but thought. Fortunately, state legislatures, alumni and philanthropists are planting little academic platoons that will make campuses less intellectually monochrome. One such, just launched, is Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

A primary mission of institutions of higher education should be the transmission of civilization’s intellectual patrimony. With the permeation of academia by progressivism, however, the mission increasingly is liberation from this patrimony in order to further progress, understood as movement away from the principles of the American founding. One notable progressive knew better. Something Woodrow Wilson actually got right was that a university should be a “seat of vital memory” and an “organ of recollection,” lest we risk “becoming infantile in every generation.”

During the national fragmentation of 1861, Abraham Lincoln said that “the better angels of our nature” would be summoned by “the mystic chords of memory.” But democratic nations, which rest on the shiftable sand of opinion, are forgetful, so memory needs to be nurtured. In his novel “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” Saul Bellow wrote:

“It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location, and avoid originality. It may be boring, but one has to know where he is. We cannot have the Mississippi flowing toward the Rockies for a change.”

Arizona State, in announcing the new school, said:

“The mission of the school will be to introduce students to the great philosophical debates across centuries through classic texts, and to use those texts and debates to prepare them for civic-minded leadership in the future,” said Patrick Kenney, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

COMMENT:  Great idea.  I hope it isn't destroyed by radicals at Arizona State, and they are there in force. 

At one time it was understood that "civics" would be taught to every student in America.  That time is long past.  Now what kids get is a kind of "anti-civics," devoted to, as George Will put it, "liberation" from America's founding.

Maybe we're starting to see some points of light.

March 12,  2017