Brazil Congress debates eliminating arts from univerisities

Brazil Congress debates eliminating arts from univerisities

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norman lebrecht

April 13, 2018

A bill has been put before the Congress to eliminate philosophy, history, geography, sociology, arts, and scenic arts from public universities.

The argument is that they can be taught in private universities. Civilisation just went backwards.

Read here.

 

Comments

  • buxtehude says:

    A lucky thing the US president doesn’t read, otherwise he might find inspiration here.

    • Dennis says:

      The US President has no authority in such curricular matters (nor does Congress).

      Sadly, however, there are some universities in America (both public and private) that have started to eliminate similar subjects in the humanities on grounds that they aren’t pragmatic and job-oriented enough. The focus now is all so-called STEM subjects (especially promoted by major philistine tech celebrities like Gates and Musk), turning universities into little more than glorified trade schools. A step back for humanity indeed.

    • Pianofortissimo says:

      Let us give him some inspiration. – Do we really need all those deconstructed philosophers, identity-mad historians, and crazy-wing sociologists? Good time to close all those nut houses. After all, High Culture is essential but it is leisure – to be learned and enjoyed at home – moreover, it is absolutely not for everybody – where the hell is my pass-word to twitter? – Maybe I shouldn’t think so hard when I’m cleaning my weapons – I’ll take my pills and go to bed, it’s late. 🙂

  • Elizabeth Owen says:

    So what will they teaching? Sounds as though students will be given a very narrow education.

  • Rgiarola says:

    This not a fact, if you can read Portuguese and especially if you live in Brazil.

    This is NOT a proposal made by any member of the parliament, but by a common citizen called Thiago Turetti. The same person that also proposed the removal of Brazilian Anti-drugs law and other of the same kind. He needs a certain high number of signatures of other citizens, in order to even been able to propose it. Later he will need to convince specially left wing representatives, and even the center in order to win the possibility to send this proposal to the federal Senate. In the practical perspective, I would say it is almost impossible to win without a party support.

    Crazy people proposing things to Parliament happens in any society.

    By the way, this same newspaper (O Globo) is telling that Japanese prime-minister is trying to do something in the same way as Mr. Thiago Turetti. In this case, I think Japan is in more danger than Brazil, since it is not proposed by no one special.

    • John Borstlap says:

      If that is true, it is something almost unbelievable, given Japan’s long standing in cultural matters and its production of great artists.

      Anyway, such signals are demonstrating the attempts at tyranny by the masses – exploited by politicians who only care about power, and don’t care a damn about responsibility let alone culture and civilization. In the name of equality, the very thing the masses desperately need to get them on a trajectory of development, they want to ‘neutralize’, but they don’t understand what they are doing. Many factors of the modern world play into their hands, but since these forces rest on numbers, not on arguments or intelligence, democracies are vulnerable to such movements.

      http://subterraneanreview.blogspot.nl/2017/11/why-high-culture.html

      • David R Osborne says:

        Well, I for one would be very surprised if anything comes of this, but there are certainly pressures out there at the moment on the humanities that do need to be taken seriously.

        I can only re-iterate that ‘cue the outrage’ in these cases is a response that will achieve nothing. My dear John, the forces you refer to, whether they possess intelligent arguments or not, are as much a product of the self-serving complacency of the academic sector as they are of the disaffected masses. Nowhere is this reality more clearly demonstrated than within the cloistered confines of the Music Faculty.

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