The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society

by Heather Mac Donald

Book Overview

One of the best of our urban journalists considers the upside-down world of public policy and the entrenchment of foolish ideas in closely reported stories from the streets of New York to the seats of intellectual power. "Insightful and articulate...entertaining and provocative."-Richard Lamm, Wall Street Journal. "Spirited, stimulating, eloquent essays...vivid and devastating....The Burden of Bad Ideas is social, cultural, and political...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566633966
• ISBN13: 9781566633963
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Strong Philosophical Analysis of Social Issues

"The Burden of Bad Ideas" is Heather Mac Donald's effort to apply classical liberal political philosophy to contemporary social issues. Like many scholars who apply liberalism to economic issues, she offers hard-hitting analysis of why many government programs intended to help the least fortunate members of society fail in the long run. As the title implies, she emphasizes the role social elites play in perpetuating these failures.She begins by placing blame for the current state of social policy squarely on the shoulders of private charitable foundations. Foundations, she asserts, provide the bulk of the funding for community activists who stamp out traditional culture among the poor and replace it with multiculturalism and "enlightened sexuality." In addition, she raises the issue of donor intent with regard to foundation agendas. She uses the 1977 resignation of Henry Ford II from the board at the Ford Foundation as an extreme example of how far professional philanthropists are willing to diverge from the goals of their endowees. Most importantly, she highlights foundation support of "public interest litigation" as the largest loophole among current prohibitions against lobbying by tax-exempt organizations.From there, she discusses specific social issues in which foundations have damaged the ideas of individual responsibility and accountability. Instead of attacking public education as an institution itself, she addresses its teaching philosophy, which she believes originated with William Heard Kilpatrick at the Teachers College of Columbia University. She asserts that Kilpatrick's efforts to encourage teachers to instill critical thinking skills at the expense of conveying actual knowledge led to the downfall of American education. As an example of the perverse effects of Kilpatrick's legacy, she discusses how the teaching of graffiti classes at a New York high school enables its teachers to avert their responsibility to enrich the academic and moral lives of their students. Thus, her critique has strong implications for educators at both public and private schools who buy into Kilpatrick's ideas.However, Mac Donald is at her best when she addresses the revolution in political-correctness taking place at American law schools. She asserts that feminist and minority "deconstructionists" seek to dispose of the notion of reason in the law, which they view as promoting white and male supremacy. She explains that they seek to replace it with "life stories" intended to introduce female and minority viewpoints into the law. She believes this phenomenon is indicative of a more general tendency among law school professors to view themselves as interpreters of the law instead of teachers of legal doctrine. Although she claims that critical thinking should be a part of legal education, she concludes that "were the view that law is only the judge's politics ever to be widely held, citizens would have no reason to grant judges legitimacy, and the basis of

brilliant in every way

Ms. Mac Donald's collection of essays explodes the conventional liberal wisdom that has taken hold of many of our institutions. The outrages she sets forth in essays such as her powerful discussions of the Smithsonian's assaults on traditional American history (she notes that Eli Whitney's cotton gin is displayed with a sign describing it as "an engine of slavery") and of the New York Times' despicable treatment of the New York City Police Department (and its support of Al Sharpton) are especially powerful. Ms. Mac Donald's command of the English language is remarkable, and her belief in individual responsibilty as the salvation of our way of life is set forth in paragraph after paragraph of memorable prose. On page ix of her Introduction she writes that examples of bad ideas of the present liberal culture are those that presume that "government can assume the role of parents; that America's ineradicable racism and sexism require double standards for minorities; that reason is a tool of male oppression; and that education is not about knowledge but ethnic empowerment."This is a stunning and eloquent book in every way. David W. Lee

The Abdication of Authority

The essays in Heather Mac Donald's collection are all provocative, if not inflammatory, with the most ironically insightful her piece on reforming the contemporary American school system, "Why Johnny's Teacher Can't Teach." Mac Donald suggests the system may neither need nor even be open to meaningful reform since it is the perfect complement for certain modern parents' methods of child-raising and for the biases spread by teacher education programs. If children are raised as imperial selves whose willfulness is to be cherished and whose behavior is not to be shaped by adult expectations, by the time such ineducable "students" reach school it is no surprise that professional "facilitators" will turn necessity into a virtue and create child-centered classrooms, spaces in which the clueless, still freed from adult authority, will lead the inept. Such parents and such educators, mutually abdicating authority to the wise child, are taking in each other's laundry, and what is there to reform, since all the key players are or should be happy? Mac Donald's are surely more important considerations than those of money, class size or computers in the classroom, and we owe her credit for calling our attention away from such palliatives to a pondering of the actual, though infrequently discussed, sentimental, anti-intellectual goals of our current schools.

Destroying Shibboleths

Where has Heather Mac Donald been hiding? We,in the midwest, ave not had the benefit of her writings. She obviously had a liberal education at Yale and Cambridge and must have come to these social issues with a positive outlook. It is apparent, however, that she, unlike her liberal collegues, actually went and talked to the people who were supposed to be the benefactors of the Great Society. It is, therefore, a greater pleasure to see someone carefully, slowly, and permanently destory the liberal shibboleths which have caused our societal decline. Her first chapter shows the villainy of the philanthropic foundations (Ford, Carnegie, etc.) whose boards have taken money created by capitalists and used it to destroy the values which only a capitalist system can create--hard work, responsibility, independence, and morality. They have used their funds to create programs which have had the opposite effect of their intended consequences. The creators of all this wealth would be turning in their graves if they knew how their money was being spent. This attempt by liberal socialists to order every part of society has trickled down to every aspect of our lives. Ms Mac Donald shows the smoldering, withering, destructive effect of these social programs on everything from law school, medicine, policing, to museums. Mac Donald pulls no punches and she has a lot to throw because she has been there. This is a wonderful book and a must read by anyone who cares about our American culture.