My students will miss the Great Books culture when it's over. I'm sure of that; they'll be wrong to, but the ignorance of their children will stun them after they take a hatchet to the common core ideas of Lionel and Jacques.
But all one has to do is look at the students, only ten years my junior, to see a future when rock music is thought equal to Beethoven, science fiction equal to Shakespeare, while movies and television are what pass for great literature.
Such is the way of progress: there is no progress without regress, without trial and error, without millions dying for it and no progress if we keep going with this common core of Western books that refuses to include any writers east of Jerusalem and Petersburg.
I look at my students, I see the coming terrible crisis, and I feel the only teacher in America who welcomes it. I don't just welcome it, I relish it. This Western-centric core deserves to die and it is precisely the populism of these students that will kill it: the long hair, the lack of hygiene, the long discursions on The Beatles and Who, the drugs, the willingness to be intoxicated in class, the resolute refusal to self-improve, the desire to see authoritarianism in every standard, this is the generation of nihilism the world desperately needs. It is a generation that will destroy the West for all time and endow the rest of the world a chance to become the elite class from which they're eternally excluded.
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