"Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before"
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“Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before” is a tidy prophecy with a pressure point: permanence. Carol P. Christ, speaking as an educator, isn’t just forecasting change; she’s trying to normalize intellectual turbulence as the new baseline. The phrase “held sway” is doing quiet political work. It frames old ideas not as timeless truths but as regimes - maintained, enforced, benefited from. That subtle shift gives permission to interrogate inheritance without having to apologize for it.
The line is also carefully escalatory. “Thousands of years” invokes the weight of tradition, but “questioned as never before” suggests a break in the historical pattern: not the usual cycle of reform, but an acceleration driven by modern conditions. In an educational context, it reads like a rationale for institutional adaptation - curriculum reform, diversity initiatives, changing canons, the push to treat “what we teach” as contested rather than settled. It’s aimed as much at anxious gatekeepers as at students: don’t panic when the ground moves; that movement is the story.
Subtextually, it’s an argument about authority. Questioning is framed as both inevitable and appropriate, implying that the old values survived partly because questioning was discouraged or structurally impossible. There’s a faint warning embedded, too: if institutions don’t make space for this re-examination, they’ll be outflanked by it. The intent isn’t to burn down tradition; it’s to strip tradition of its immunity.
The line is also carefully escalatory. “Thousands of years” invokes the weight of tradition, but “questioned as never before” suggests a break in the historical pattern: not the usual cycle of reform, but an acceleration driven by modern conditions. In an educational context, it reads like a rationale for institutional adaptation - curriculum reform, diversity initiatives, changing canons, the push to treat “what we teach” as contested rather than settled. It’s aimed as much at anxious gatekeepers as at students: don’t panic when the ground moves; that movement is the story.
Subtextually, it’s an argument about authority. Questioning is framed as both inevitable and appropriate, implying that the old values survived partly because questioning was discouraged or structurally impossible. There’s a faint warning embedded, too: if institutions don’t make space for this re-examination, they’ll be outflanked by it. The intent isn’t to burn down tradition; it’s to strip tradition of its immunity.
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