As high school seniors throughout America will be receiving acceptance letters to colleges within the next month, it would be nice for parents to meditate on what they are getting for the $20–$50,000 they will pay each year.
The United States is no better than any other country, and in many areas worse than many. On the world stage, America is an imperialist country, and domestically it mistreats its minorities and neglects its poor, while discriminating against non-whites.
There is no better and no worse in literature and the arts. The reason universities in the past taught Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Bach rather than, let us say, Guatemalan poets, Sri Lankan musicians, and Native American storytellers was “Eurocentrism.”
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God is at best a non-issue, and at worst, a foolish and dangerous belief.
Christianity is largely a history of inquisitions, crusades, oppression, and anti-intellectualism. Islam, on the other hand, is “a religion of peace.” Therefore, criticism of Christianity is enlightened, while criticism of Islam is Islamophobia.
Israel is a racist state, morally no different from apartheid South Africa.
Big government is the only humane way to govern a country.
The South votes Republican because it is still racist and the Republican party caters to racists.
Mothers and fathers are interchangeable. Claims that married mothers and fathers are the parental ideal and bring unique things to a child are heterosexist and homophobic.
Whites can be racist; non-whites cannot be (because whites have power and the powerless cannot be racist).
The great world and societal battles are not between good and evil, but between rich and poor and the powerful and the powerless.
Patriotism is usually a euphemism for chauvinism.
War is ignoble. Pacifism is noble.
Human beings are animals. They differ from “other animals” primarily in having better brains.
We live in a patriarchal society, which is injurious to women.
Women are victims of men.
Blacks are victims of whites.
Latinos are victims of Anglos.
Muslims are victims of non-Muslims
Gays are victims of straights.
Big corporations are bad. Big unions are good.
There is no objective meaning to a text. Every text only means what the reader perceives it to mean.
The American Founders were sexist, racist slaveholders whose primary concern was preserving their wealthy status.
The Constitution says what progressives think it should say.
Hopefully college teaches them that Prager is a complete joke. The last desperate hope for a candidate claims that college is bad and NRO jumps on the bandwagon (luckily they will go over the cliff together). Can't wait for 2016 when we have a shot at the White House.
No, Prager is merely stating what some have figured out - too many lines of study in college have little to do with learning and much to do with - well something completely useless. The stories of people deeply in debt - with job offers that don't allow a reasonable payoff plan are mounting, even sometimes for people who get MBAs.
Talk to a college academic advisor in sciences or engineering - ask them how many students in college aren't ready to be there, don't have the proper respect for learning and study and hardwork and will not make it - maybe shouldn't even be in school at all. You call it anti-education. I call it wasted money. And who is loaning it to them - or right, us!
Of course we love the Chinese these days - everything they do is important and right. Well when their students come over they do STEM and business in accounting and finance. They aren't allowed to take anything else. Many jobs in America don't require a college degree, but we have decided they must, so go 20K to 30K in debt to push papers in a cubicle all day.
Real smart - and so pro education. If you cannot see the point about the anti West bias that exists in almost every hall of higher learning, Not to mention the other problems with the product they provide, you just have your head in the sand.
You're basing your viewpoint on an old, well-meaning maxim that more education is always an objective good. Yes, more education is generally preferable to less as it opens a student up to greater opportunity, but the quality and content of the education matter as well.
What is the goal of education? What is its proper end in the student? In society? The first educators (in Western Civilization anyway) were Greek philosophers believed the purpose of education was the pursuit of Truth. A man who understands his world and can appreciate Beauty for its own sake is a man fulfilled. Much later, the Catholic Church established the first universities upon this view of the role of education; they believed, rightly, that the pursuit of Truth leads to the Divine. Unfortunately, these early educators were all dead white males, which explains why their view has been shunted aside over the last fifty years.
Mr. Prager's point above is that the quality of higher education in this country has declined and that it has become more akin to indoctrination rather than the pursuit of Truth. Yes, it's possible to find quality courses of study at almost any university even today, but it is much more difficult to weed out the pseudo-intellectual noise.
For those students who aren't very circumspect about their course of study and just want a degree, college may NOT be a very good choice: taking on $100K in debt with nothing but a women's studies degree and a chip on your shoulder to show for it is a bad deal. And for those parents that wish to inculcate their shared values in their children, college may not be a very good choice either. Working and saving your whole adult life to pay for some tenured fool (who is sheltered from the reality of the world) to tell your child that everything you hold dear is wrong is a bad deal.
Mr. Prager is not advising that people don't attend college, nor is he disagreeing with the maxim that greater education leads to greater opportunity. He is simply pointing out that the quality of a college education has declined with the rise of progressive indoctrination in the curriculum, and that the "greater education" maxim only works if the education one receives furthers one's pursuit of what is True.
You give Mr. Prager a lot more credit than he deserves. Frankly, awesome username aside, I'd rather you write these articles. Your post was more thought provoking and well written than the article. "Whaa!!! Your children are getting brainwashed! Waaa! They'll have different opinions on things than you! Waaa! Your entire world is falling apart! Panic!" Your college-bound offspring is 18. Who cares what they think? He/she will, God willing, have 50 years to figure things out. In the meantime, you're going to be an old idiot who's hopelessly out of date and clueless. Just like your parents were when you were 18. Just like your kids are gonna be when they're parents. That's the point of being 18: to be invincible and all-knowing with absolutely no idea that you have no idea. Freak out about it or get over it. If you love it set it free, if it loves and respects you and you raised it right, IT WILL COME BACK.
Evidence is all around you that "having 50 years to figure things out" hasn't been working. In fact, it's the 60's generation that said "don't trust anyone over 30" who have mucked things up so terribly.
Cheer up. 1. The tenured fools are retiring, and being mostly replaced with underpaid, overworked adjuncts, who have fewer delusions about the Working Class now that they're being downwardly mobilized into it.
2. The adjuncts often resent having to pass on the cutting-edge political thought of 1972, and may try to slip in some dead white European males (Shakespeare, Aristotle), dead white European females (Brontes, anyone?), or even dead Middle Easterners who influenced Western Culture instead of trying to exterminate it (Avicenna, the Layla and Menoun poems).
3. The students think it's all BS anyway. They say what they have to say to get the grade, then make fun of it at the next frat party. So they're not always being indoctrinated with leftist thought, but unless they have a happy epiphany in the class of the adjunct described in #2, they're not doing much thinking of any kind.
Brooklinean has a point that, to be fair, must be accepted as a truism: the "new generation" avers its independence by rebelling against the value system of the prior generation. We who have survived our personal rebellious years and have lived long enough to become the "prior generation" have learned that, indeed, our parents were right: they had already made all the mistakes we repeated, and that our children are about to reiterate. Most young people eventually learn enough about the world that they return to the values instilled by their parents. (Not all children do so, admittedly: I grew up to be a conservative... thoroughly disappointing my VERY liberal parents.) W. Churchill's (?) statement holds true more often than not: "If you are not a liberal when you are young, then you have no heart. If you are not a conservative when you are older, you have no brain." They will grow up. Let us pray they gain wisdom.
You picked a great moniker. In fact, like so much of America, you are too "lazy" to think beyond what you are being fed by your leftist leaders. Wake up and think!
Personal experience. With degrees in science and engineering and experience in some of the fields mentioned I can say engineering is better preparation. Only the cream of the crop scientists are valuable in the real world. The rest work as low paid technicians or try to teach.
Oh, so any science that you approve of is really engineering, and everything else is loopy loo ivory tower stuff. But without basic research, well lets just say your DVD player would be a lot more "steampunk".
No surer sign can be seen of the opposition to the stated wishes of the public and the people paying for that education than Wilson's statement. Unfortunately, it's true that the purpose of higher education (and, to a certain extent, the lower levels as well) is to make that student hostile to their heritage.
Everybody knows war is noble, and big capitalist corporations are the real victims of a stacked deck.
It's a good thing that colleges and universities are moving away from teaching English and Philosophy, and concentrating on practical subjects like Hotel Management.
The United States is no better than any other country, and in many areas worse than many. On the world stage, America is an imperialist country, and domestically it mistreats its minorities and neglects its poor, while discriminating against non-whites.
