DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE. Call for western civilization courses at Stanford gets backlash:

The Stanford Review’s petition to bring Western Civilization courses back to Stanford has met with some backlash.

Western Civilization courses have been absent from Stanford’s curriculum since the 1980’s when, according to a New York Times article, Rev. Jesse Jackson marched with students to remove the courses. Jackson, along with students, chanted “hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go.” Protesters complained that the Western culture course had “European-Western and male bias,” and “sexist and racist stereotypes.”

As Maggie’s Farm notes, “If people do not know the foundational origins and concepts from the Bible and Aristotle through John Locke and Adam Smith, it seems to me that there is very little that you can read with understanding. It is no ‘triumphalist narrative,’ but just the story of how we got where we are. It’s a map.”

But most colleges today have very different notions of which direction they’d like to send their students off to explore.

Related: “Hold Colleges Accountable to the Real World,” Victor Davis Hanson suggests. Outside of engineering classes, do colleges still believe that reality is, err, real?