Classical subjects are being discarded in favor of “gender and similar pseudosciences,” the Russian president said
Vladimir Putin attends a meeting in Moscow, Russia, November 27, 2023 © AP / Mikhail Klimentyev
Schools and universities in the West have abandoned the liberal arts in favor of gender studies and other “pseudosciences,” Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked in a speech on Tuesday.
“In the West, they are now practicing not only the policy of ‘cancel culture’, but also the actual abolition of liberal arts education,” Putin told a gathering of the World Russian People’s Council in Sochi.
“As a result, both [Western] culture and education are becoming primitive,” he continued. “Many classical subjects are simply thrown out of Western curricula, replaced by some kind of gender and similar sciences – pseudosciences, of course.”
The phenomenon highlighted by Putin has also been extensively condemned by Western conservatives, who have decried attempts by left-wing academics to cancel the study of ancient Greece and Rome over the so-called “whiteness” of these ancient societies, and to insert transgender ideology into the fields of medicine, archaeology, and psychotherapy, among countless other examples.
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Explaining that education influences culture, Putin recommended that instead of following these Western trends, Russians should “learn from our ancestors, who both in traditional and avant-garde art, set an example for the whole world.”
“I am convinced that the country’s sovereignty and the strengthening of its role in the world are impossible without the flourishing of its original culture,” he declared.
As “woke” ideology proliferated on American college campuses in recent years, the quality of students being admitted to these institutions has appeared to decline. Last month, the creators of the ACT college admissions test revealed that scores on the ubiquitous entry exam had fallen to a three-decade low. Several months earlier, a study by Northwestern University and the University of Oregon found that, for the first time in nearly 100 years, the average IQ scores of college-aged Americans were declining. The scientists behind the study blamed the dip on “a change of quality or content of education.”
