MStem wrote:
Another great essay on the matter...
Your title implies that the opinion expressed is that of the National Association of Scholars but that's incorrect. There is no mention of the NAS in the article at all. So you're off to a really good start.
MStem wrote:
“Higher education now aims to produce highly trained idiots (in the original Greek, the word meant a private person) who function in an economic system they cannot comprehend, defer to a government that protects their radical individualism, and, as deracinated global citizens, define their moral universe through abstract notions of equality and justice.
Few who are not themselves part of the problem need to be told that our current university system is in shambles. Free inquiry has been replaced by “safe spaces” and the shouting down of anyone who speaks out against anti-Western ideologies and the cult of victimization. Bureaucracies that smack of the old Soviet Union enforce a code of political correctness infusing every aspect of university life with suspicion and resentment. Having banished all but a tiny remnant of conservatives and even most liberals from the professoriate, universities become ever more determined to undermine all aspects of American culture and higher learning.”
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2019/05/from-indoctrination-to-education-salvaging-the-university/ br “Higher education now aims to produce highly t... (
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Our education system has ALWAYS produced idiots (if you are indeed using the Greek meaning of the word). Our education system evolved from commercial interests during the Industrial Revolution when it became clear that unlike agriculture, industry needed people who could at least read instructions and perform basic math operations so they can function... in an economic system they don't understand. Even today, about 90% of the American-educated working force does not really understand the economic system that controls them and this is 100% intentional.
The next important thing to our institutionalized public education system is to insure that young minds are molded into "good citizens" that will never question their authorities. This is why our children only learn about U.S. history as it was written by patriots and not as it actually happened.
This has ALWAYS been the case in public schools. Nothing has changed. Higher-education though, well that's a different animal. Higher-education is where we find something called liberal-arts, which is an approach to knowledge where students are taught to figure it out for themselves, rather than simply following someone else's instructions. (that really is the definitive difference).
I know some folks think liberal art is finger-painting and weird performance art, but any university program will show you that liberal arts includes philosophy, science and anything else that requires the ability to "figure things out".
This was fine as long as the only people who could get to that level were people who were born into wealth because once they figure out the American system of economic slavery, they are less likely to complain about it because they are also able to realize that system is what supports their own wealth.
The problem came along when the universities themselves became an opportunity for profit. Most Americans don't need to go to college to DO their jobs. But once universities adapted a profit-driven business model, and realized every high school graduate was a potential tuition. They started opening all kinds of opportunities for students to pay tuition through all kinds of debt schemes. Now almost every American pays money to go to college and this is where the problem started.
People who are born into working class families being exposed to liberal arts and the methods of critical thinking that allow them to see the economic slave system and how HIS family is oppressed by it. Before you know it you have a generation of college-educated Americans pointing out unfair the American system is to its own working class.
Of course for the lesser-educated this news goes against the grain of their basic "be a useful idiot and don't ask questions" conditioning. For these people, the news of their own oppression is an insult. For the higher-educated people in the wealthy-class (as in no need to work, so not working-class). This is a potential threat to their unfair advantages and those with influence on the media will initiate all kinds of propaganda designed to invalidate the discoveries being shared and for some, the efforts go as far as trying to kill liberal-arts all together.
So yes, campus indoctrination IS real... It has ALWAYS been the basis of public education in America. Which is probably why Americans are among the most indoctrinated people in the "free world".
The rambling article doesn't really say anything specific about "indoctrination", other than to suggest that...
"Years (usually more than the advertised four) of indoctrination in the classroom and, more harshly, the dormitories, followed by decades of crushing debt, all made far worse by the realization that our degrees have qualified us for very little."
That has more to do with the fact that universities are trying to profit from an over-abundance of potential students, for which there are no jobs.