The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Two Faces of the American Academy (http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/the_picture_of_dorian_gray_the_two_faces_of_the_american_academy.html)
QuoteWhile the faculty, administrators, and trustees bask in the splendor of their educational empire, the students under their care descend deeper and deeper into a maelstrom of insecurity, impecuniousness, immaturity, and the insatiable lust for sex, power, and diversion. Addled with drug and drink, host to a staggering rate of venereal disease (half of the new cases each year occur among 15- to 24-year-olds), crushed under student loan debt, and, increasingly, unable to find anything better to do with their time than riot, the American university student â€" ignorant, ill-mannered, and enraged â€" would seem to be the diametrical opposite of the American university system he inhabits.
QuoteEverything is power, the professors proclaim. There are no eternal truths. The United States is an oppressive society. Capitalism is the enemy. Everyone around you is a racist. Scott Walker is Hitler. I hate Republicans. The only possible relationship to the university is one of thievery. The only legitimate subjects of inquiry are the grievances of the perpetually aggrieved.
As for the students: a common lament among those who take universities seriously is that graduating seniors are statistically no better educated than incoming freshmen. This is all true when “educated†is taken to mean “having greater facility with logic, language, math, science, and history than one previously enjoyed.†But, as the now undeniable outbreak of full-blown Maoist Cultural Revolution on our campuses makes clear, the students have been soaking in every word their teachers have said.
QuoteLet us not be surprised that the young people at universities are shrieking, infantilized moral cripples, while their professors are the very picture of worldly success. These two images are inseparable. The professors have sown falsehood and profited from it. Their students have reaped the bitter harvest and now literally scream for someone to placate them in their barbarism.
Call it the dummy down of the culture. It started way back with Reagan, and it has ever been a slippery slope downward.
It was inevitable, that the student protestors of the 1600s would eventually become the deans etc. New generations of student protests have erupted since then. The Academy aka Platonic dogmatics ... has been desiccating young minds for centuries. Most rebellious students of the 1600s went out and got drunk and went a-wenching. But one gay student stayed at the dormitory long into the night developing his own theory ... Newton. Much carbon is only charcoal, but some carbon is a diamond.
Expect that the current status quo won't remain much longer ... and the current educational system will be swept away with computer-assisted learning ... K thru 16. Only grad students and Ivy League will know what a professor is.
Having attended 3 universities, I resemble that remark.
Quote from: gentle_dissident on November 15, 2015, 02:26:54 PM
Having attended 3 universities, I resemble that remark.
My feelings about college are mixed ... and I attended at a time when I was paid up at the same time I graduated. Computer-assisted on-line education ... will more or less work for the already literate ... the early grades will be harder game. But the a-holes will find some way to charge extreme tuition for access to pay-walled on-line education ... until they finally go belly up. Some universities realize this, and are already free for non-credit.