Roll over Beethoven

Sarah Honig
Another Tack
11 November '10

Even Barack Obama’s midterm electoral humiliation won’t redeem US foreign policy. The problem didn’t begin with the history-deficient mind-set of American students who’ll earn their bachelor’s degrees in 2014. But the intellectual rootlessness of the class of 2014 exacerbates the flaws. Today’s students/tomorrow’s leaders fertilize the soil into which bad seeds are sown by the current Washington elite.

On the simplistic level it was a hoot to read that to the class of 2014 Beethoven is a movie pooch, Michelangelo was a computer virus and Czechoslovakia never existed. For the past 13 years Beloit College’s Mind-Set List by Tom McBride and Ron Nief was a guaranteed source of hilarity, because each year the ignorance quotient it registers seems to climb to unprecedented, more grotesque and inconceivable heights.

But rather than amuse, The Mind-Set List should alarm. It’s safe to assume that things are way worse off campus.

The ignorant are more amenable to manipulation. Those who don’t know there ever was a Czechoslovakia are unlikely to have delved into what led up to World War II. The word appeasement isn’t likely to give them goosebumps. They won’t know how Czechoslovakia was betrayed, ripped apart and sacrificed by antiwar priests on the altar of world peace. It’s improbable they’ll have internalized the sobering realization that the priests were (at best) fools and that the peace they sought to serve was a false god.

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