Our culture and society abounds with overeducated idiots. We have substituted quantity of graduates for quality of graduates for decades and it shows.
By making a college education affordable for many colleges it has become big business and standards have been lowered to such a degree that many college students don’t have even a rudimentary grasp of the world around them. But more students means more money for the educational establishment.
We see the falling standards typified in student intolerance of opposing opinions, their political conformity, their sanctimonious screeching on any subject, and their rejection of the Western canon. With flags flying and drums beating they march their way back to witch burning, completely oblivious to their own ignorance and gullibility.
This process started in the 1960s, as did so much else in our national catalog of debacles, when adult college administrators abdicated their responsibilities in the face of student radicals and college takeovers.
The young punks should have been forcibly removed by police then expelled. But in many of our elite universities the exact opposite happened. We have paid for it ever since in the kind of insane left wing scenes we see on campuses almost every day.
And over about the last thirty years we’ve seen the growth of the PC and woke movements in the halls of academia. This fascistic ideology seeks to erase The Enlightenment and replace it with Bolshevik re-education camps. We are producing generations of vipers and paying for it with tax dollars and parental savings.
Is there any remedy for this intellectual malady? Yes. Make colleges, four year institutions, much harder to attend. Raise the academic standards so American higher education again becomes elite and produces intellectually elite graduates capable of discerning the difference between Herbert Marcuse and George Washington.
No, you cry! Elitism is bad! Our current elites are out of touch liberals! You’re right, to an extent. They are liberal but they are pseudoelites, as actual elites gain their status through merit, not through the parrot-like incantation of professor fed leftist clichés. Thus, we need to change elites.
It is harder to fool a very sharp older kid than it is to fool a dumb kid looking to drink and carouse his or her way through a university. Thus, along with raising standards for admission, let’s raise the age as well. Let youngsters get a taste of the real world for a couple of years before college. They might find a good job and decide college is not the be all and end all recruiters make it out to be. Or even better, they may gain some real world wisdom making them students of value.
As for government-backed loan programs? Keep them in place, but only make them available to military veterans or children of those disabled or killed through military service. If you want the benefits of state coffers, perhaps you should ante up first.
I have close friends who are academics and I hear from them on a regular basis regarding their concerns with colleagues, students, and administrators. I myself spent a bit of time as a college instructor, though as it was at a junior college and thus had many adult students I avoided much student stupidity.
I also avoided some of it in my own higher education, as I went to college in Europe. The professors there were just as left wing, but the academic standards were very high and they appreciated good thinking no matter what the subject. That’s probably the only reason my vociferous conservative sarcasm didn’t get me thrown out.
The status quo, a nation filled with clueless college graduates who went through the motions for four years at a diploma mill, only to put themselves or their parents in serious debt, is unacceptable.
We must restore high standards and return the college mission to education, as opposed to its current goals of indoctrination and big business. Only then will we have the semblance of a properly educated society.