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Entry: Did I Kill Robert Lowell? Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/did_i_kill_robert_lowell#5828 Post contents: Mr. Stove, in your school you never had it so good. <b>ALL schools in Terra del Gringo are performing arts, visual arts, and (a far older malady) sports-arts schools.</b> 1. Performing arts: I retired from a high school in January, 2002, with all the pleasure of a man condemned to life imprisonment who suddenly is pardoned. At this school, the drama, band, chorus, and (especially important to the cretinous upper-middle class for their female issue) the dance programs were vastly more important than what I was teaching (English, German, Latin), if one is to judge by numbers, student interest, administrative support, parental support, who got a room of one's own, and who could call students out of another’s class for “practice” and “trips”. In addition, every classroom had a TV mounted on the wall, hooked up to the local commercial cable. Some teachers in the afternoon would sit and watch soap operas. When the ACC basketball tournament was going on during the day, its broadcast often became a replacement for any academic lesson. Of supreme importance is that all teachers now are expected to be performing artists, actors, and clowns to entertain students, and are so taught in our damnable “Teacher Colleges” (often calling themselves “Universities”) and barbarian Education departments. Thus subjects that really can’t be turned into entertainment at all, e.g. math and foreign language, are taught and learned poorly among Gringos. 2. Visual arts: Art History, Art Theory, and even the low-level “Art Appreciation” aren’t taught, or are only mentioned in passing to what is really taught in such classes: studio art and "creativity". Yearbook, once an after school club, is now an elective, and it too calls students out of others classes. The overwhelming majority of female teachers, whatever their discipline, are hardly better than room decorators – putting cutsy kitsch on what were once “bulletin boards" (i.e. once for bulletins), on the cement brick walls, on doors, and on windows. Go and take a look. One teacher loved to display her Kermit the Frog stuffed animal – and we’re talking about a High School teacher! Then there are “projects”, usually scissors, paste, glue, crayon, and colored poster paper constructions, of a particularly inane content, and particularly loved by “science” teachers. An example from a “World Literature” class: Franz Kafka specifically forbade his publisher to print any illustration of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis. When I in one class and the Kermit teacher in another taught <i>The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) </i>, I had my students first understand the Wisdom Tradition, a living tradition among Jews, and used Kafka’s “Before the Law”, “In the Gallery”, and “The Next Village” as examples of two genre in this Tradition, the parable and the riddle. Mrs. Kermit’s first assignment: “Here’s paper and crayons. Draw Gregor.” The first time I taught Ibsen’s <i>The Enemy of the People</i> (you can bet the Cultural Marxists aren’t teaching that play!), one otherwise fine student asked to do a project, and presented a 2 by 1 cardboard box as a rather primitive stage set, the characters cut out of assorted magazines. I didn't abuse her; it's all that she had been taught to do. After that, I told all who wished to do “projects” that they could read three other plays by Ibsen, and, after school, take an essay test on them. Point of fact: any teacher offering an elective that’s not a performing or visual art can forget having enough students to fill his class, and thus have his class canceled, save for those electives required to get into cheap state universities. No wonder that Jews and Asians are setting up their own, private, schools. 3. The other problems in Gringo schools, other than sports, are Cultural Marxism, the invasion of the Lumpenproles, and the nefarious and clandestine activity of the Ultimate Enemy, the guidance councilor. And Mr. Stove is right to distinguish Classic Marxism from Cultural. But these topics are other posts. One quasi-Classical Marxist, Richard Hofstadter, wrote the best book on the woeful failure of the Gringo Public Fool System: <i>Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962)</i>. Still worth a read, for all its weaknesses. And Comrade Dick never knew how good he had it either! Sent at: 2008 07 08