"Every word is a prejudice,"
said the man across the table.
"you know these colleges are hotbeds of Liberalism!"
"These kids just aren't old enough to be able to tell what they're being taught from the truth. They're not teaching both sides."
He's got an interesting point. High levels of education in our country do seem to be associated with high levels of free thinking and pragmatism and therefore must be caused by it as proved by the cum hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy -- and whereas that's obviously bad and according to the divine doctrine of judging truth by what the less educated are comfortable with, it's therefore quite obvious that opposing viewpoints in other fields this Republican might
Disciplines like mathematics, physics, biology, engineering and medicine? they only teach one side and that's elitist. Everything has two equal and opposite sides, the right side being, by definition -- right. You know all those things are best left to folksy opinion, anonymous blog commenters and to websites run and funded by Republicans who hold forth from country club and yacht club dinner tables all over America.
In history classes, we can be sure courses are not being taught about the secret liberal cabal ruining the world from its headquarters in Kenya, about the danger of subjecting corporations to the law rather than letting them write it, or that those poor women in Salem really were agents of Satan and why universal suffrage doomed the country to Divine wrath. Why, even Pythagoras and Newton and Einstein are treated as relatively established authorities and one hardly hears of the four elements or phlogiston or the aether or divine creation as acceptable differences of opinion at those hotbeds any more. And what of alternative cosmologies and opposing views in the sciences and history and literary criticism? Well, in fact they are being talked about and constantly tested, but we do have the other conservative doctrines of "if I don't know, nobody knows" and the inapplicability of past experience to the present time -- and that, dear reader, is that. It's a hotbed.
No, what they should be doing at Columbia or The London School of Economics and Political Science and other centers of Liberal propaganda and academic honesty, is reciting the catechism which includes such credos as: tax cuts pay for themselves and never, ever cause recessions; that massive concentrations of wealth and political power in the hands of a tenth of one percent of the population make for "freedom" and that like a driverless car, the markets will always stay on the road -- and so government should stay out of business practices and move into the pulpit; as God and the Founding Fathers intended.
Face it; universities, public and private are hotbeds and that's cold comfort. Hell, why don't we do as that great Capitalist prophet, Mao Zedong did and simply close them down? The people know best!
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteHave long thought, in good John Henry Newman vein, that a genuine education (especially of the damn-liberal arts variety) should make a body somewhat more tolerant and humane, and therefore more liberal. Heck, that's practically the dictionary definition of "liberal," isn't it? Tolerant, generous, humane. I ought to know this, but what are the stats on this issue? I get the sense that the sort of education lots of college people get nowadays has the opposite effect, even in the humanities, or that it's at best a wash and leaves many graduates essentially unchanged, unmoved, from where they were when they entered the hallowed halls, be they Ivy League or state. It's always a tendency for education to get whittled down and emptied out until all we have left is diploma mills that turn out useful dummies with a specific skill set or two but no ability to reason beyond their own noses. And let's face it, for the right, that's the model citizen: somebody who feels downright sleepy at the mere prospect of asking serious questions about how and why the powerful do what they do.
Mao Zedong: “There is a great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.”
ReplyDeleteAn ability to quote Mao? That's education, comrade. ;-)
ReplyDeleteHistorically, all reactionary forces on the verge of extinction invariably conduct a last desperate struggle against the revolutionary forces, and some revolutionaries are apt to be deluded for a time by this phenomenon of outward strength but inner weakness failing to grasp the essential fact that the enemy is nearing extinction while they themselves are approaching victory.
I think about 80% of college grads today are business majors and when you hear about the importance of education these days, it's almost always expressed in terms of employability and potential earnings.
Yes, of course I'm one of those liberal farts people and we used to truly look down upon those rare and focused folks who took useful majors like business or agriculture. I flitted about from subject to subject like a stoned butterfly, from physics and geology and music to English romantic poetry to Medieval German dialects to Zen and I've continued to be a jerk of all trades. How many people do you know that can design and build a radio transmitter, read hieroglyphics, know Mozart from Dittersdorf, talk about Gothic architecture, navigate with a sextant, write haiku in Fortran and be utterly useless at anything anyone would want to hire me for?
In red states like this one, Democratic strongholds seem to be those towns containing a collage, but maybe it's only the faculty since 18-25 year olds don't vote.