The Elephant in the Classroom
from CultureStack Hosted by Gary Arnell
Seventy years ago, the faculty of the University of Chicago published a 54 volume series entitled "The Great Books of the Western World" - an attempt to identify and make readily available the most important ideas that made our civilization possible. In the introduction to that series, the editor wrote: "It is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a few generations." Western Civilization was built on dialog and the exchange of ideas. Cancel culture and book banning are anathema to the liberal tradition. Both sides of the political aisle point fingers at one another. The removal of those books from a place of primacy in our classrooms and conversations endanger what is most important to us. The removal of one book is particularly egregious. The Judeo-Christian Bible is foundational to classical liberalism and representative democracy - the keystone of our civilization. From it, we derive human dignity and human rights, equality theory, justice, even science. For all the clamor in recent years about content missing from our history lessons one "banned" book remains the elephant in the room.
Embed this episode
No transcript yet.