COLUMBUS DAY IS COMING

Education is the transmission of civilization from previous generations to the rising generation. By the end of it, children have become civilized adults and see themselves as members of the civilization in which they have been educated.

Columbus discovered America from the perspective of those who are members of Western Civilization, including descendants of the American natives who greeted him. As educated people, they are no longer indigenous natives but modern “Westerners.”

To the extent that they do not identify with Columbus but with their primitive ancestors, they have not been educated.

To learn more, see my Kindle book Contemporary Education’s Racist Road to Barbarism, available at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00P4IT3JC/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i7

Columbus Day 2020 II

Columbus Day, which this year marks the 528^th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, is tomorrow.

Everyone who identifies himself as a member of Western Civilization should acknowledge the greatness of Columbus. He brought the Western Hemisphere into the orbit of Western Civilization and thereby correspondingly increased the civilized area of the earth’s surface.

Columbus is one of the greatest men in the history of our planet.

He played an essential role in the development of capitalism, with its science, technology, and industry that eliminate perpetual tribal conflict over scarce land and natural resources by making it possible for the earth to support everyone, ever more abundantly.

He helped make it possible for the average person in every First-World country to live at a level surpassing that of kings and emperors in the past. The same would be true for the average person everywhere if Western Civilization and capitalism existed everywhere.

Tuition Refunds for Today's Uneducated Graduates

Most college and university graduates of the last generation or more are essentially uneducated in the nature and values of modern Western Civilization and its leading offshoot the capitalist economic system.

The courses that should have given them this education, namely, the courses in the liberal arts and humanities, did not, despite the fact that in many cases the students not only paid for this education but incurred substantial debt in order to do so.

These students deserve a refund. In the case of private colleges and universities they should be paid to the extent possible out of the endowments of the schools they attended, which in some cases amount to tens of billions of dollars.

For the rest, all government financing, direct or indirect, serving to support education in the liberal arts or humanities should be abolished, including in primary and secondary education, as well as in higher education.

In all cases in which licensing laws require degrees of any kind that contain a liberal arts or humanities component, that requirement should be deemed satisfied upon a statement to that effect from the candidate’s prospective employer.

This would make it possible for new centers of learning to be established that either avoided liberal arts/humanities courses altogether or offered new and different varieties of such courses.

It is time to defund "education" whose product is ignorance and savagery.

Why Columbus Is In Fact the Discoverer of America

Today marks the celebration of Columbus Day, in honor of the man who discovered the Western Hemisphere. (October 12 is the actual date of his discovery.)

 

In view of the fact that there are growing numbers of barbarians living in the midst of modern Western Civilization, who have no understanding or appreciation of its value, I find it necessary to quote from my pamphlet Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism to explain why it is that “… I regard the discoverer of the Western hemisphere to be Columbus, rather than the very first human beings to arrive on the North American continent (probably across a landbridge from Asia), and rather than the Norwegian Leif Ericson. I consider Columbus to be the discoverer not because of any such absurd reason as a preference for Europeans over Asiatics (Leif Ericson was as much a European as Columbus), but because it was Columbus who opened the Western hemisphere to the civilization I have made my own. Columbus was the man who made it possible to bring to these shores my ideas and values. It is not from the perspective of the residence of my ancestors, who were certainly not Italian or Spanish or even West European, that I regard Columbus as the discoverer of America, but from the perspective of the residence of my ideas and values. Just as at an earlier time, they resided in Greece and Rome rather than in the Russia of my ancestors, so in the 15th and 16^th centuries, the home of my ideas and values was in Western Europe. I hold Columbus to have been the discoverer of America from that perspective. This is the perspective that any educated person would hold.” (p.6)

 

Those who deny the fact that Columbus was the discoverer of America demonstrate that they have not made the knowledge and values that constitute Western Civilization their own. They are self-confessed and self-made aliens living in the midst of Western Civilization yet preferring to all of the knowledge and values that constitute it, the meagre, primitive state of knowledge and values constituting the culture of “indigenous peoples,” who are at a level comparable to that of people who lived many thousands of years ago, with no knowledge of reading or writing, and hardly any knowledge of science, mathematics, philosophy, music, or art.

Whoever, in the words of Ludwig von Mises, prefers life to death, health to disease, and wealth to poverty, is logically obliged to prefer Western Civilization and its offshoots of individual freedom and capitalism to all other civilizations and cultures that have ever existed.

 

Dr. Reisman’s pamphlet Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism can be ordered in Kindle format from Amazon.com for 99¢ at http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001KCWY0Q.