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Saturday, February 06, 2016

The regrettable decline of higher learning

What do campus microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, speech codes and censorship have to do with higher learning?

American universities want it both ways. They expect unquestioned subsidized support from the public, but also to operate in a way impossible for anyone else.

Colleges still wear the ancient clothes of higher learning. Latin mottos, caps and gowns, ivy-covered spires and high talk of liberal education reflect a hallowed intellectual tradition.

In fact, today’s campuses mimic ideological boot camps. Tenured professors seek to indoctrinate young people in certain preconceived progressive political agendas. Environmental studies classes are not very open to debating the “settled science” of man-caused, carbon-induced global warming — or the need for immediate and massive government intervention to address it. Grade-conscious and indebted students make the necessary ideological adjustments.

Few sociological courses celebrate the uniquely American assimilationist melting pot. Race, class and gender agenda courses — along with thousands of “studies” courses — have been invented. A generation of politicized professors has made the strange argument that they alone have discovered all sorts of critical new disciplines of knowledge — apparently unknown for 2,500 years — to ensure that graduates would be better educated than ever before.

Universities have lost their commitment to the inductive method. Preconceived anti-Enlightenment theories are established as settled fact and part of career promotion. Evidence is made to fit these unquestioned assumptions.

Two unfortunate results have predictably followed.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Our children are doomed.

Thornton Crowe said...

If you look at the article a couple above, you see when students can't find NH, then they're doomed in the road map we call life. As I said up there, if you were to ask any other national where NH is, they would know it. Why? Because their cultures don't pander to liberalism's use of education to propagandize their public. They just learn facts - a place revision has no room for.

Not just younger people but older people really need to investigate more about the worlds beyond their backyards - not to become globalists per say, but to become more astute on how that larger world impacts their personal one.

You don't know how many comments here make me laugh as they emulate the ignorance I'm speaking of. People thinking we fight the Middle East for Oil when our oil consumption comes from Venezuela and Canada for the most part -- only about 3-5% comes from Middle Eastern countries. People who look stuff up, find out things like this and they cease making silly comments with baseless claims.

There is nothing more important and worth seeking in this life than Knowledge and Wisdom. If people were more active in those two arenas, they probably wouldn't make half as many bad choices as they do in the current world we all have to endure as a result.

Another fallout from knowledge and wisdom comes Common SENSE. Sadly, good old fashion common sense seems to be on America's most endangered list these days!