Principles and Heresies

It is a slender link that maintains civilization through time—the education of each new rising generation, particularly of that small leading minority on whom the essential burden of preserving and developing civilization rests. With the secularization of the churches and the decline of the rooted broad family, it has been more and more upon the universities and colleges that the responsibility for the education of future leadership has come to rest.

This last link in civility—as Dr. Johnson called “the state of being civilized”—is straining and breaking before our eyes. The evidence of this catastrophe is not only, or even primarily, to be found in the mobs of SDSers and black militants who race across the campuses in their arrogance, obscenity and Neanderthal brutality. They represent only the boiling head of a deep systemic disturbance, which is shattering the educational structures of our civilization. It is a disturbance the focus of which lies not in the student body but in the faculties and the administrations.

FS

About the Author

Frank S. Meyer

Frank S. Meyer was a senior editor of National Review.

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It is a slender link that maintains civilization through time—the education of each new rising generation, particularly of that small leading minority on whom the essential burden of preserving and developing civilization rests. With the secularization of the churches and the decline of the rooted broad family, it has been more and more upon the universities and colleges that the responsibility for the education of future leadership has come to rest.

This last link in civility—as Dr. Johnson called “the state of being civilized”—is straining and breaking before our eyes. The evidence of this catastrophe is not only, or even primarily, to be found in the mobs of SDSers and black militants who race across the campuses in their arrogance, obscenity and Neanderthal brutality. They represent only the boiling head of a deep systemic disturbance, which is shattering the educational structures of our civilization. It is a disturbance the focus of which lies not in the student body but in the faculties and the administrations.