An Education for Our Time

Bunting, Josiah III

whom he has become, perhaps, too close—he has little to tell us. Here, for instance, is part of his analysis of one supposed masterpiece: "If the '5os saw American culture turning away from Marx...

...But if you want to listen to the self-incrimination of those responsible for the state of the American entertainment industry, this book is as good a place to start as any...
...He remembered, and once cited at a...
...shareholder's annual meeting, Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702): "Religion hath brought forth Prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother...there is a danger lest the 44 Students will learn to box, and to dismantle, then reconfigure the engine of a jeep...
...According to Bunting, who has agreed to "edit" the letters and provide some commentary: Adams was uninterested in what money could do for him "personally...
...They will also perform most of the housekeeping chores in the dormitories and around the campus...
...As an insider in the world of higher education, he has no doubt suffered through endless symposia and retreats on the future of American education...
...In the picture's somewhat crude emotional economy, Clyde's gun does what his dick can't and when his dick can, there's nothing left for his gun to do, so he dies...
...has read the learned papers, talked to the experts, studied the trends...
...Everybody knows that too many courses are taught by demoralized graduate students while the professors with the celebrated names and the six-figure incomes hole up to do research and write papers for journals that nobody reads...
...So he took a different route, imagining a new college dedicated to the ancient verities...
...His indignation is contagious...
...Free Catalog 1-800-677-3483 HAMILTON Fa Is Village, 06031-5005) The American Spectator September 1998 81...
...At some point during his time at the college, every student will read The Republic, The Peloponnesian War, War and Peace, and Locke's Second Treatise, among many other Great Books...
...America's bOgestbargain book selection...
...Bringing drugs on to the campus will be grounds for expulsion...
...Here, for instance, is part of his analysis of one supposed masterpiece: "If the '5os saw American culture turning away from Marx toward Freud, Bonnie and Clyde signifies not so much a return to Marx, as an escape from the insistent navel-gazing and psychologizing of Tennessee Williams and William Inge, a rebirth of interest in social relations....If Freud was dead, long live Wilhelm Reich...
...Chapel" is but the remembered morning ritual of a jettisoned past (though yet cherished in the memory by men older than I who "sat through"— great phrase...
...Bunting could have written Ten Steps to Restoring the University, or something equally conventional, but he is a provocative thinker and a stylish writer...
...Bunting led that fight and when the Supreme Court ruled against VMI, he was, in his own words, "savagely disappointed...
...nie and Clyde carried a message of sexual liberation...
...Hundreds of new arrivals monthly...
...Likewise, everybody knows that crime is widespread on the average campus...
...This is what Josiah Bunting, III has in mind in An Education for Our Time: a new college, uncorrupted by all the old compromises and surrenders...
...Indeed, any controversy so engendered is at once forced into the ritualistic genuflection before a new God: the God of Consensus, Himself the child of an even greater secular Divinity — Consensus-Building...
...He did a year of graduate work at Cambridge, then went on to make his fortune as a high-tech entrepreneur...
...It wouldn't be...
...He bought nondescript suits from a wholesaler in Los Angeles and rented compact cars from Budget....His only indulgences were a 1970 D-Model Steinway concert grand piano and a library of eight thousand books...
...The students will live in dormitories that are segregated by sex...
...Interesting guy, this Adams, with interesting ideas and a fetching way of putting them, especially when he writes about the sorry state of higher education in America...
...Students will learn to box, and to "dismantle, then reconfigure in some prescribed way, the engine of a jeep...
...But where Bunting/Adams really soars is in describing the new school he envisions...
...Let's start over...
...Yet he had a clinician's interest in the corruptions of money for those susceptible...
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...Why not just pack up, head for the territories, and begin again...
...Of course, they don't teach that in school these days...
...Not unlike Splendor in the Grass, BonAn Education for Our Time Josiah Bunting, III Regnery / 246 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Geoffrey Norman I n the fall of 2000, according to the respected author of the new book An Education for Our Time, American students will begin matriculating at a small new college, located in the High Plains of Wyoming...
...But one wonders about parents currently struggling to pay crushing tuition bills so that their offspring can learn how to disdain with style the culture that made their education possible: If such a college did exist, how many such parents wouldsend out for an application and look into a home equity loan to pay the bills, if that were necessary...
...Consider, first, the construction of this book...
...Parents sending their child off to an elite university can, these days, expect to pay a fortune not to have that son or daughter educated as to his duties as a citizen and the glories of his heritage but indoctrinated in the hostile little orthodoxies of the day...
...Students at this college will build things...
...Required courses in logic and deontology...
...Doing what is right," Adams explains, helpfully...
...tions of several variables, and other topics offered in conventional courses in integral calculus...
...Bunting is the superintendent of Virginia Military Institute, which has been the establishment's least favorite school for the last several years, chiefly for its resistance to admitting women...
...What in God's name is deontology...
...Politics, Biography, History, Travel, Computers—over 60 subject areas...
...This college is, alas, a fiction, though in the best sense: an act of inspired imagination...
...Though VMI's first year as a co-educational school was relatively trouble-free under Bunting's leadership, he has not changed his position on the question—as he said in a recent speech before the National Press Club...
...There is enough such "red meat" here that the book would be worth reading attwice the price...
...enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness...
...They will master outdoor survival skills such as mountaineering, orienteering, swimming, living off the land, and parachuting...
...And in their care to avoid the merest chance of giving offense to any, by taking stouthearted positions on such moral issues, universities nowadays unite to an essential soullessness, a cowardice they are pleased to call "Regard for All Positions...
...Bunting is a soldier, and not afraid to fight for his beliefs...
...And his response has been essentially to say, "The hell with it...
...But then, the woes and failures of higher education are well documented...
...That such a school does not exist—that in a country full of private and public universities and colleges, there is nothing even close—says something very troubling...
...Thus are our children to be educated liberally...
...hundreds of them, in Hanover, New Hampshire, or Davidson, North Carolina, as the country foundered in depression or armed itself for the war against Hitler and Japan...
...No, Chapel is vanished in tone and tint—as indeed is any enforced allegiance to moral behavior of the kind enjoined in the Books common to the great faiths of our country...
...It was all summed up by that ubiquitous antiwar bumper sticker: Make Love, Not War...
...The stated goal of the college is to admit students who show evidence of being leaders and then to teach them—in the words of the school's founder — "their obligations as American citizens...
...that cheating (including plagiarism) is routine...
...It is too expensive, too politically correct, insufficiently rigorous, and so forth...
...He was headmaster of Lawrenceville before taking over at VMI, his alma mater...
...Students will be required to memorize certain texts, including Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and Robert E. Lee's farewell to the Army of Northern Virginia...
...None...
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...Consider: • This college will accept no government money...
...He had no interest in owning things —property, houses, moveables...
...Students will be required to "master foreign languages—specifically, two of them...
...and that some universities admit students who can't read and give degrees to people who don't know when the American Civil War was fought or, in many cases, why...
...The curriculum will include courses in the history of Western music and also the use of basic hand tools...
...A Rhodes Scholar who taught history at West Point, he resigned his Army commission to serve as President of Briarcliff College, then of Hampden Sydney...
...So, how about starting afresh, in the American tradition...
...One reads, nods in agreement, and murmurs, "Yeah, give it to 'em, brother...
...The school is unusual—in fact, utterly radical in its notion of what constitutes an education...
...and they will learn to "live and work efficiently in times and circumstances of pain or danger, and to ignore their solicitations...
...There are no exemptions from mathematics and every student will be required "to work comfortably through problems in single-variable calculus, series and funcGEOFFREY NORMAN is editor at large at Forbes FYI...
...This college, which Bunting never names, is the vision of a character he calls John Adams, who spells out his plan in a series of letters while dying from cancer...
...Once "an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the last days of the famous Robert Maynard Hutchins," Adams was a Marine in World War Two and "badly wounded on Iwo Jima...
...Taking in the ideas for this preposterous school, one after the other, the reader begins to feel a little giddy himself...
...Talk about "somewhat crude...
...But while he is a military man—a paratrooper and combat veteran of Vietnam — A School for All Seasons 80 September 19 9 8 • The American Spectator Bunting is also a genuine educator...
...His novel The Lionheads was judged by Time magazine as one of the ten best novels of 1972, and remains one of the best works of literature on Vietnam...
...Only a dying man, delirious with pain killers, could believe that a graduate of any contemporary college would be "reading a commentary on the Iliad on the way to his first job interview...
...Here he is, for instance, on the place of religion on campus: Nowadays neither the Cross (nor the Star of David) nor the Flag has anything but the thinnest, most begrudged presence on the campuses of universities esteemed as the brightest citadels of academic excellence...

Vol. 31 • September 1998 • No. 9


 
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