**The Woke Revolution Is Erasing The Past**
The Woke Revolution Is Erasing The Past
_Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClear Wire (https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2023/04/19/the_woke_revolution_is_erasing_the_past_149121.html),_
**Students of English and history are going the way of the dodo bird.**
**
?itok=uo4ru3e1 (
?itok=uo4ru3e1)**
During just the last decade, their numbers at colleges and universities have dropped by a third – and humanities enrollment is down by 17%, Nathan Heller reports in his recent New Yorker article, “The End of the English Major.” (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major)
Data collected by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project (https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators) show that “ **from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent.** Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY-Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates â?? standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges â?? saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half.”
Conservatives who have long lamented the politicization of the humanities, highlighted by the rise of women’s studies, queer studies, ethnic studies as well as the transformation of English and history into tools for the left’s vision of social justice (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/08/arts/american-historical-association-james-sweet.html#:~:text=A%20column%20last%20summer%20by%20James%20Sweet%2C%20the,which%20spread%20along%20racial%20and%20generational%20fault%20lines.), might be tempted to cheer this development. They might also applaud a main driver Heller and others (https://archive.is/ZTnXJ) cite for this trend (https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/04/02/letter-from-an-english-department-on-the-brink/?utm_medium=email): **the determination of students spooked by the 2008 economic meltdown to choose majors that can help them land decent paying jobs. _Reading “Middlemarch” may be uplifting but a marketing degree pays dividends_.**
Unfortunately, something nefarious may be going on. It’s hard to believe that schools run by leftwing professors and administrators aggressively intent on telling students what they should think are passively responding to market forces. It is also not farfetched to suspect that they might be allowing the humanities to wither because it is a roadblock to the woke revolution they are advancing.
English and history have always had an inherent conservative streak: They are, almost by definition, backward-looking disciplines. They have sought to conserve and thereby connect students with what the Victorian writer Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and known.” (https://www.staugustine.net/blogs/rectify-names-a-blog-on-publishing/e2809cthe-best-that-has-been-thought-and-known-e2809d-september-3-2012/#:~:text=The%20quote%20is%20from%20Matthew%20Arnold%E2%80%99s%20Culture%20and,thought%20and%20known%20in%20the%20world%20current%20everywhere...%E2%80%9D) Studying the history of ancient Greece and Rome and the art of the Renaissance, reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Austen, Ellison, and, of course, the Bible, show us how our ancestors’ decisions shaped our world while providing wisdom as we confront the great question: _How can I lead a good life?_
**At bottom, it is a recognition that history is ever the story,** as Faulkner put it, “of the human heart in conflict with itself,” (https://genius.com/William-faulkner-nobel-prize-acceptance-speech-annotated) and that as we search for answers to eternal questions we can find solace by turning to the giants upon whose shoulders we stand (https://www.science.edu/acellus/2018/11/newton-seeing-further/).
This mindset is problematic for the woke revolution. It holds that there is no abiding human nature or human condition; people are blank slates upon which society stamps ideas, like pieces of factory tin. It does not see us as biological creatures with innate instincts and concerns but a collection of social constructs that can be changed like hats. Utopia is possible if everyone can be made to wear the correct ideas. This forward-looking ideology has little use for the past; it was no accident that a seminal model for our woke movement, the French Revolution, abolished our Gregorian calendar and imposed its own, declaring September 1792 to be the start of Year One (https://www.abelard.org/france/revolution_calendar.php).
Amnesia is the crucial psychological state for the woke revolution. In order to control thought, language, and reality itself (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/03/23…
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/woke-revolution-erasing-past