It used to be the case that our educational institutions focused on teaching students truth and how to find it. But over the last 50 years or so, many academics decided that it was more important to indoctrinate students with “progressive” ideology. To do that, truth was shoved aside in favor of feelings and subjectivism.
In today’s Martin Center article, Professor John Kainer looks at this lamentable development.
He writes:
You’ve probably heard people appeal to “my truth,” but this phrase gets the relationship between the self and truth exactly backwards. It is the truth that lays claim to us, not the other way around. Worse, it suggests to the student and their peers that the truth is radically subjective, that is, the truth of an idea depends on the individual’s willingness to accept it. This is becoming common in various “soft” academic fields where academics want to escape rigorous examination of their ideas by saying “That’s my truth.”
Among other abuses, we see “scholarship” that is based on nothing but personal anecdotes. It isn’t possible for peer review to evaluate such “research.” And worse, many professors have shifted from teaching objective knowledge to an activist stance — trying to change society rather than understand it.