American Thinker Abraham H. Miller September 15, 2016 As the price of higher education has gone up, both the quality of the education and the opportunities it creates have vastly diminished. What has survived is the myth of higher education: the idea that higher education is a means to a professional career and social mobility. For tens of thousands of college graduates each year, that has proven to be a cruel hoax. > How did we get here? The basic intellectual skills required to get through a real education are possessed by probably no more than 7.5% to 15% of the college-age population. A real education not only means near endless hours of immersion in books but also some enjoyment of the process. It means an ability to deal with abstract thought and ideas that are frequently counter-intuitive. It means an ability to see how concepts organize information, how inductive thinking produces general principles, and how deductive reasoning produces hypotheses. Articles: Reforming Higher Education This was the view of higher education, if not always the reality, fifty years ago. College was thought to be hard work and not whatever socialization is supposed to mean.
Monty Python had their Knights who say Ni! and we have our Naughts who say Nietzsche. When politicians promise to send everyone to college is when we should know that the degree doesn't mean what it should. I favor a return to specialized schools with less of an emphasis on broadening minds (yeah, right) and more of an emphasis on the specialty of accounting, engineering, etc. I mean, Bruce went to cop college, right? Do you really want to hear his philosophical musings while he confiscates your crack pipe and cuffs you? @Bruce
That's a terrible example to use to persuade me, because as far as I'm concerned, the smarter cops are, and the more given to critical thought they are, the better.
Recently I found myself reflecting on the Yale Halloween email "scandal." The school wanted to prohibit "culturally offensive" costumes. A faculty member suggested that it was, perhaps, too much for the institution to impose a ban but that students should be allowed to experiment and explore those decisions on their own. The backlash was swift and fierce. And her husband, a fellow administrator and professor, ended up being berated on campus by protesters who called him "disgusting" and told him they hoped he was never able to sleep. When he said his job was to provide a place of intellectual challenge and facilitate civilized discourse he was shouted down. No, they argued, his job wasn't to provide an "intellectual place" it was to make their residential college feel like home with all of the safety and comfort that comes with it. In short, his job wasn't to facilitate discussion that might make people challenge their preconceived notions it was to provide a "safe space." As I watch the video of the students weeping and yelling and cursing and throwing fits I cannot help but consider how they are the same age as the people I served in the Navy with. Nine weeks of recruit training may not make you buff but it does, generally, teach you that you aren't such a special snowflake. I think that an education can be a valuable thing. But I think that many schools have too broad a notion of what constitutes higher education. Higher ed should prepare students for the world without necessarily functioning as a trade school. Perhaps the best way they can do this is to prepare young people emotionally to enter the real world. I really do feel bad for those young people. They will enter the workforce and be wholly unprepared. They will show up at their first job, Yale degree in hand, and get fired the first time they decide to impose their notions of "shared governance" on their employer or the first time they get "disgusted" with the benign email of a colleague. Personally, I've always been a fan of the idea of mandatory public service. But I think I'd modify that to simply be that a requirement of college admission should, perhaps, be one year of full-time employment or volunteer experience at an entity not controlled by a parent, grandparent or sibling. I feel like this would help young people more effectively discern career goals, help set a foundation for emotional maturity and provide many of them with the opportunity to actually earn money. It will never happen, of course, but it would probably be nice.
He was cursed and told to shut up and told he should be out of Yale. I'm of two minds on this. One deplores the situation while the other deplores the people who created it and are now reaping what they sowed.
