In our wonderful brave new world in which high-school students learn about financial planning, political correctness, and the environment, and university courses have become politicized and no longer highlight the major names of Western civilization, I wonder how many of the following geniuses and greats are actually known today and/or will be forgotten by subsequent generations.
Aquinas
Aristotle
Bach
Beethoven
Ingmar Bergman
Blake
Rachel Carson
Cervantes
Charlemagne
Chekhov
Constable
da Vinci
Dante
Darwin
Descartes
Dickens
Dickinson
Durer
Einstein
Erasmus
Galileo
Goethe
Goya
Handel
Stephen Hawking
Homer (not Simpson)
Ibsen
Kurosawa
Martin Luther
Martin Luther King
Nelson Mandela
Michelangelo
Monet
Montaigne
Thomas More
Newton
Picasso
Plato
Raphael
Rembrandt
Renoir
Rodin
St. Francis of Assisi
Shakespeare
Shaw
Tchaikovsky
Tolstoy
Turner
Van Gogh
Voltaire
Orson Welles
Whitman
Wordsworth
Woolf
Yeats
Vermeer
Frank Lloyd Wright
Well, the great dumbing-down is now going flat-out. So much for subject matter of consequence, ideas, history, serious critical thinking, philosophizing, and depth. Who are the heroes of our time and the great people of our age? How do their contributions contribute significantly to our knowledge, understandings, and appreciations of Life, human nature, Truth, Beauty, and wisdom? How much poorer/shallower/dumber are a people who do not know who these above greats of Western civilization are!