At many of our colleges and universities, the search for knowledge has been replaced by “an experience.” Professors are often more concerned with being popular and inflating the egos of their students than improving their minds.

In today’s Martin Center piece, Yale student Michael Samaritano reflects on “The Post-Truth Classroom.”

Samaritano begins:

Veritas. Lux et veritas. Veritas vos liberabit.
Truth. Light and truth. Truth will set you free.
These are the official mottos for Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins. They reflect a conception of the university in which the dissemination and discovery of truth is the school’s main purpose. In the past, these institutions largely lived up to the promise of their mottos.
Today, these mottos are still engraved in these schools’ buildings and placed on these schools’ flags. But they stand now like relics of a forgotten past. Like most contemporary universities, these schools have abandoned the dissemination of truth as their central aim. Instead, they have adopted a pedagogical approach which affirms that moral truth either does not exist, cannot be ascertained, or is not worth ascertaining.

In this, Samaritano sees the malign influence of “progressive” thinking, in particular the writings of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Marxist who is a darling in American education schools.

“Ultimately,” Samaritano states, “truth must be the primary end of education. The main goal cannot simply be, as many now suggest, the acquisition of useful or profitable skills. Skills are only a means. They exist to be put to good use. But how can graduates put the skills they have learned to good use if they do not know, in the strictest sense, what ‘good’ is? And where will truths of this nature be promulgated and discovered if not in our schools?”

The answer is that they won’t be, and then what kind of civilization will we have?