https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/the_new_elite_learning_curve_descent_into_ignorance.html
A generation of students have been taught that they don’t need to actually study facts or consider ethics so long as they learn how to shriek at the appropriate trigger points.
Between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, I lived for several months on kibbutz Hagoshrim, on the border of Israel with Lebanon under the shadow of the Golan Heights. Hagoshrim was referenced in a recent Wall Street Journal article about war preparations along the northern border, which reported that although the nearby town of Kiryat Shmona had been evacuated, the residents of Hagoshrim, the kibbutzniks, had decided not to evacuate but to stay in support of the army. I was not the least surprised, for I knew the kind of sturdy people who lived there.
One of my early jobs as a volunteer laborer on the kibbutz was to dig a grave. It was a Sabbath, and I was the only Gentile who could handle a shovel and pick so I worked alone. The ground was rock hard, and the job took most of the day. As visitors wandered into the cemetery, I learned that the grave was for one of the elderly kibbutzniks who had a line of tattooed numbers on his wrist, marking him as a Nazi death camp survivor. The news made my work even more somber and as I dug, I reflected on the horrors he must have endured. Eventually I became aware of a white-haired man sitting on a nearby bench, another of those battered souls bearing a wrist tattoo. When I took a break, he gestured me to rest on the bench beside him. I thought I should say something but had no idea what would be appropriate, or even if he spoke English. Finally, I just awkwardly offered “he survived all that hatred.” I didn’t think he heard, or understood, for he said nothing for a long minute. Then, forlornly staring at the grave. he just murmured “all that stupidity” and spoke no more.
I took the comment to be just a bitter offhand reply and thought no more of it as I resumed digging. But through the years the words returned to me. I had mentioned hate to one seasoned in hate, who had known it in its most savage, ruthless forms, had endured the 20th century’s vortex of death, and he had seemed to correct me. It wasn’t hatred that was the essential cause of Jewish persecution, he was saying, it was stupidity, the ignorance that allowed the hate to take root.
Any doubt I had about that conclusion has been eradicated by events on certain college campuses since the October 7 Hamas attacks. Mobs of students scream about the apartheid state of Israel without understanding Israel or what apartheid is. They shout about a history of oppression without bothering to understand the actual history. They rant about the need to return to a Palestinian state without knowing there never was such a state. They gleefully celebrate reports of unspeakable atrocities and call for more. The most extreme of these demonstrations have occurred on the campuses of our top-ranked schools. The more elite a university is, it seems, the more ignorant and intolerant its students have become. I doubt any of these protesting students at Harvard, for example, are aware that in the school’s early days graduates were required to learn Hebrew, because of the wisdom found in ancient Jewish writings.
