Modern Education and the Destruction of Culture
Speech delivered at the Traditional Britain Conference to the Traditional Britain Group, on October 18, 2014 ( http://traditionalbritain.org/blog/modern-education-and-the-destruction-of-culture/)
Due to incessant semantic shifts over the last one hundred years the word ‘culture’ has become meaningless. It denotes everything and therefore it means nothing. It can express a political or a theological belief; it can also stand as a label for someone’s sexual lifestyle, or someone’s choice of drugs, such as speed culture, grass culture, or meth culture. The word culture has become so liquid today, just like the liquid times we all live in today.
The modern meaning of the word ‘culture’ has nothing in common with the original meaning of the word, which until recently denoted the cultivation of man’s soul or character. The same semantic aberrations can be observed with the word ‘education’, which used to be the basis of culture, but which has today acquired a purely mechanical and utilitarian meaning. In the American -English language it is common to hear the phrase; “my son and my daughter need to get education”—as if education is a perishable commodity.
The incessant usage of the word ‘education’ should not come as a big surprise. After all in our postmodern liberal System everything has its price tag —- and consequently nothing has value. In the German language the words for culture, i.e. “Kultur,” and “Kulturkampf” (culture war) had a very specific metapolitical meanings, particularly during the period of Romanticism. Culture bearers, or Kulturträger in the early 19th-century Germany, be they itinerant poets or library-bound philosophers, played a crucial role in the identity building process of the German people and other peoples in central Europe.
Another lexical and conceptual headache, with all due subsequent legal and political nightmares for non-conformist thinkers, started some 40 years ago with the introduction into the American language of the compound noun ‘multiculturalism’. This word has no etymological basis. In fact, the word ‘multiculturalism’ is an insidious euphemism for multiracialism. However, given that the usage of the word ‘race’ is avoided by the media and politicians —except when used in smearing “White racists,” it had to be packaged into a softer term consistent with the regnant ideology that races don’t exist. Read more