The Decaying Evolution of Education...

[Fading Fast]

This isn't the first time I've seen this, and it probably won't be the last, but as a student who had received his Associates in the liberal arts a couple years back, and now working on his bachelors in journalism... the liberal arts and sciences have become so much more than they used to be. Sure, you still have the art majors, the painters, musicians, philosophers, day dream believers, and English majors (the kind of studies even I don't see how one could make a career of), but now.. you also have the sciences thrown in with these guys. Your historians, your chemists, physicists, mathematicians... the kind of people who built the atomic bomb! You have your engineers, your economists, your geologists, your climatologists, your computing technicians, the people who built the tech that got us to the Moon. Frankly, I believe the liberal arts, unless you become a physicist or economist, are vastly under appreciated and under funded. Far too many people going for mundane business degrees because that's what they feel they must do, rather than pushing their potential, pushing their minds, and doing what they want to do. The "easy" route is almost always never the right one.

My argument in favor of liberal arts for those so inclined is that it can be very practical to have a broad base of knowledge of history, of different disciplines, different philosophies, etc. I've worked in finance my entire career and have used most of the things I learned obtaining my liberal arts degree in my career.

History has allowed me to recognize patterns today that echo the past; psychology has given me an edge in the psychology of markets and understanding other people; philosophy taught me to think down to core premises and how to build arguments; English literature taught me both better writing skills and how universal and timeless the human the condition is; and sociology taught me to recognize group patterns and how, for example, different markets in different countries can reflect different cultures. I could go on and get more specific.

While I mainly traded and managed money and teams of traders and money managers, I also wrote extensively as - surprisingly - decent writing skills are hard to find and much needed in finance. In writing about markets, I would draw on all those disciplines I learned about in college which, IMHO, gave my writing more power and verve. I was asked to write speeches for the President of one company, the Treasurer of another and several senior executives based on my market commentary pieces. These were "outside my job description" assignments, but helped my career and made it infinitely more interesting.

Having a broad base of knowledge - with an understanding of how to leverage it - can be an incredibly practical resource, which is why I am so surprised Liberal Arts is thought of, by many, as impractical. Yes, it might not lead to an immediate "glamor" job out of school, but most careers take time to develop, twist and turn along the way and only get going later on - for that, a broad base of knowledge, how to think, how to analyze facts, how to translate specifics into broad concepts and vice versa is incredibly powerful.

Some people know exactly what they want to do at a young age and some careers require years of very in-depth study to acquire the specific knowledge necessary to succeed. Some people also prefer a more vocational type of career which requires specific technical training. A liberal arts education isn't for everyone, but for those that it fits, properly leveraged it can both enhance one's career and enrich one's life. I am amazed that it is a point of view that even requires defending - but clearly it does.

 

[tonyb]

I am reminded of what I was told by a friend of my parents, a school teacher himself, who said that a good education ought to leave a person keenly aware of just how little he knows.

Nothing I've learned since then, in school or anywhere else, has done anything to challenge that wisdom. I have never met a truly well-educated know-it-all.

 

[LizzieMaine]

If you don't learn at least one new thing every day of your life, you're just not paying attention.

 

[tonyb]

Sometimes I wonder if people really wish to learn, especially if that newly acquired knowledge potentially challenges that which they have held dear.

 

[MikeKardec]

Having a broad base of knowledge - with an understanding of how to leverage it - can be an incredibly practical resource, which is why I am so surprised Liberal Arts is thought of, by many, as impractical. Yes, it might not lead to an immediate "glamor" job out of school, but most careers take time to develop, twist and turn along the way and only get going later on - for that, a broad base of knowledge, how to think, how to analyze facts, how to translate specifics into broad concepts and vice versa is incredibly powerful.

Some people know exactly what they want to do at a young age and some careers require years of very in-depth study to acquire the specific knowledge necessary to succeed. Some people also prefer a more vocational type of career which requires specific technical training. A liberal arts education isn't for everyone, but for those that it fits, properly leveraged it can both enhance one's career and enrich one's life. I am amazed that it is a point of view that even requires defending - but clearly it does.

I had the most narrowly focused liberal arts education imaginable, every discipline interpreted through 20th century Art, yet I still find that I use it daily and I no longer even work in the area I specialized in at school. It could even be said that I have gone through life finding jobs I could inflict my the wider interpretation on!

Yet, in the manner in which it's presented today, the economics don't work out unless you really shop intelligently for an education ... something I definitely do not see in my discussions with students and parents. Oddly, they all seem to think that figuring it out is too much work or that it will simply turn out all right in the end, and then they put themselves into more debt or harder circumstances than they need to.

Many modern college programs also put students through a significant period of brainwashing, the sort of thing thing would do a cult proud. My purpose in saying this is not to approve or disapprove of one political point of view or another but what goes on in some schools is way beyond having a few professors who might introduce students to ideas that their parents don't approve of ... I'm all for that. It's "programming" pure and simple and it is not even done by the faculty for the most part, it's done by the school administrations and the people who run the dorms and such. Learning can and should change the world for the better though freedom of thought and a free exchange of all ideas. But I'm not so sure schools should try to turn their students into robot-like change agents.

I saw the beginnings of this when I was teaching and I ignored it because I just thought it was silly and that no student would go for it ... I always thought of my students as rebellious toward anything an "adult" tried to tell them. But as the events of this fall show it can get very serious. I loved the idea of my students being activists for the things they believed in ... I just want to believe that they've made up their own minds ... and that they are not going to be in hock for the rest of their lives paying off student loads while having been led astray either in academics or activism.

 

[Fading Fast]

I had the most narrowly focused liberal arts education imaginable, every discipline interpreted through 20th century Art, yet I still find that I use it daily and I no longer even work in the area I specialized in at school. It could even be said that I have gone through life finding jobs I could inflict my the wider interpretation on!

Yet, in the manner in which it's presented today, the economics don't work out unless you really shop intelligently for an education ... something I definitely do not see in my discussions with students and parents. Oddly, they all seem to think that figuring it out is too much work or that it will simply turn out all right in the end, and then they put themselves into more debt or harder circumstances than they need to.

Many modern college programs also put students through a significant period of brainwashing, the sort of thing thing would do a cult proud. My purpose in saying this is not to approve or disapprove of one political point of view or another but what goes on in some schools is way beyond having a few professors who might introduce students to ideas that their parents don't approve of ... I'm all for that. It's "programming" pure and simple and it is not even done by the faculty for the most part, it's done by the school administrations and the people who run the dorms and such. Learning can and should change the world for the better though freedom of thought and a free exchange of all ideas. But I'm not so sure schools should try to turn their students into robot-like change agents.

I saw the beginnings of this when I was teaching and I ignored it because I just thought it was silly and that no student would go for it ... I always thought of my students as rebellious toward anything an "adult" tried to tell them. But as the events of this fall show it can get very serious. I loved the idea of my students being activists for the things they believed in ... I just want to believe that they've made up their own minds ... and that they are not going to be in hock for the rest of their lives paying off student loads while having been led astray either in academics or activism.

I could not agree more, in particular, about your point about shopping intelligently for an education. I had to pay my own way and therefor only applied to state schools where I knew exactly what the tuition would be and how I would pay for it without going into debt. I worked all summer, on every break and 20 hours (minimum, usually more) a week during the school year and came out of college without any debt.

I don't think that is doable anymore as tuition costs have grown faster than the general cost of things, but still, intelligently research, one can keep their debt to a minimum. Also, because I was paying my own way and didn't think "it will just turn out all right in the end," I focused on learning - on getting a broad education - so I studied, applied myself and I believe that knowledge and those skills have paid off as noted in my post. I went to school with some kids who either ran up debt or had their parents paying for them, they goofed off, partied and hardly studied. That's their choice, but I bet they got a lot less out of their college education than they could have.

I believe I got great value for my education dollar, but it was a thought-out plan and I worked hard in college. I think too many kids (and parents) just believe in going to college for the "experience," and, as you said, hope it all works out. I approached it as a plan to improve my life choices and opportunities.

As to the current environment on campuses - I'm going to stay away from the politics, but it does seem that there is an indoctrination and an anti-dialectic going on today that seems the opposite of the broad idea of education and intellectual pursuit as I understood it.

 

[Harp]

Frankly, I believe the liberal arts, unless you become a physicist or economist, are vastly under appreciated and under funded.

Veritas, veritas. I advised a pre med at Michigan last year that while Medicine was a jealous mistress even at the baccalaureate level, that
he would never have such opportunity to hone his mind later in life. Philosophy, Chinese, the Italian Renaissance, French or Russian literature,
History, Fine Art, Classical Music and much more all awaited his discovery. A Jesuit high school grad, he had never read Boethius' Consolation,
which rather surprised me. Another young man off to Purdue for an engineering degree told me he had never read Fitzgerald's Gatsby, or any
of Hemingway or Faulkner. I gave him an armful of books and wished him the time to read across a broad liberal arts curriculum.
I have always felt that education is to prepare for life.

 

[Bushman]

If you don't learn at least one new thing every day of your life, you're just not paying attention.

Interestingly similar to my motto:

A day of life is wasted if you haven't learned at least one new thing.

 

[MikeKardec]

As to the current environment on campuses - I'm going to stay away from the politics, but it does seem that there is an indoctrination and an anti-dialectic going on today that seems the opposite of the broad idea of education and intellectual pursuit as I understood it.

I was nervous when I wrote that and you are right to caution us. It can be seen as political and I want to be careful (just call me out on it or delete this post if it seems inappropriate) but I find myself more interested in just the aspect of consumer relations.

Is there an issue about getting what you pay for? Actually, the issue is even more significant than that, it has become "What Are You Paying For?" If paying for a traditional academic education that will open your mind, aid job placement (either through vocational training or though rigorous intellectual exercise) and allow you to experience the world of thought in a manner that gives you many alternatives, is what you are after, is it appropriate to be sold something else? Especially, if you don't bother to discern or don't have the capacity to discern what the alternatives might be. I applaud the idea of students engaging with progressive ideas (I've disseminated a few of them myself) but I also would want the schools to be clear about what the deal is ... if an expensive "activist camp" is what the students really want then it is fine to let them pay for it. As long as they recognize the limitations and call it what it is.

Actually, I believe that a good deal of the stress the students are showing is because they know that they are paying a great deal to live in a world (college) that is much like the way they would like the real world to be. Many of them don't want to prepare for that real world by studying the sort of things that would actually change it for the better -- as in we only need one student to come up with something like cold fusion that actually works or creates a economic theory, like socialism, that serves people of differing political tastes equally and dissolves some of our current left/right differences.

Many current students seem to be demanding that others create a world that they'll be comfortable in by removing things that could be disturbing for them (like the 1st Amendment) without having the intellectual discipline (without the schools requiring the intellectual discipline) to see that could also lead to the opposite of what they want. They have a lot of fear. I get it, growing up is scary. But a good education could alleviate some of that fear and help them to construct a reality that mitigates much of the rest. First, however, they would have to open their minds and learn; take classes that are hard, require a good deal of thought, and dissect the writings of the many intelligent people who have come before. Revolutions that call for change without a plan for living constructively and realistically with that change are destined to end in horror.

I have a nagging feeling I may be being a hypocrite but at the moment I'm staring blankly at the screen and not seeing it. I'm sure someone will let me know. Do realize these are just things that I'm thinking. It's a process and in an hour I might have a different opinion on my own or someone else might lead me to one.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've said it before, and will say it again -- I've read all sorts of pearl-twisting horror stories about the delicate little orchids supposedly coming out of the colleges, all indoctrinated with one-size-fits-all beliefs, but I've never actually *met* even one, face-to-face in person. And I know a lot of twentysomething kids who've gone to everything from elite schools to community colleges. They come out as no less and no more well adjusted than I myself was at that age, and a good deal less radical than I was at that age, to boot. (This disappoints me to no end.)

 

[GHT]

You need to up the alcohol strength of your beer. A lot of students get a bit bolshy after a few pints.

 

[sheeplady]

I am of the opinion that gathering sources is not sufficient to decide on an ideal or belief. There is the component of individual assessment and critical thinking, that although classified as part of the current education curriculum is far from substantial to meet its foundational demand.

IOW, learning how to think (on various levels) at times means more that what to think.

What do you think @sheeplady

I think you're right, and this is one place that the American (United States) educational system is failing badly. Students overall have a very poor understanding of information literacy and almost no understanding of the scientific method. Honestly, I think that this accounts for 90% of the rabid anti-vaccination movement out there, among other things.

The students I have taught have a very good understanding of *if* a source is reliable by the time they are juniors and seniors (last two years of university for undergraduate). However, they have almost no ability to tease out bias, and if they do, no idea how to balance bias in what they read OR to determine how that bias could be effecting validity.

I'll give you a good example. Most students are quick to pounce on the fact that Wikipedia has been determined to be as factually accurate as the traditional published encyclopedias of the past. And that is true. But what that leaves out that although there are few errors in what is presented, the facts that are chosen to be represented are biased. Who edits and contributes to Wikipedia tends to be predominately men. This means that much of the information chosen to be included tends to scale to that perspective. A look at the Hedy Lamarr edit page on Wikipedia shows the fight it took for her contributions to frequency hopping to be included, while much of the page concentrates on her acting.

There's no board sitting around saying, "Well, we want to make sure to include women's technical achievements in this edition." There's a bunch of editors sitting around arguing over if a nude scene is more important than being the grandmother of Wi-Fi.

Students aren't so dumb to think that everything they see on the web is true, but they have a very difficult time of balancing what they see with what they don't and sorting through *who* is speaking and *why* they are being heard the loudest and who is *not heard* and why. Not every peer review paper is equal, not every study is good. And not every small study from a backwater institution is necessarily bad, either.

I think the least we can do is make sure that every student graduating from high school can at least understand the scientific method. I've had numerous arguments with people who think that the scientific method is "Too Complex" for the average 12th grader to understand (including several teachers! in mathematics and sciences), but I really have to question what we are doing as a country if we don't think the vast majority of our citizenry should have a fundamental grasp of what scientists do. When you don't teach the how and why of science, it seems like "magic." And "magic" and "voodoo" and fairy dust is all really easy to brush off for not being understood.

And honestly, if you can't read a scientific research paper in your area of study and explain it by the time you leave college, what did you learn?

 

[MikeKardec]

I think the least we can do is make sure that every student graduating from high school can at least understand the scientific method. I've had numerous arguments with people who think that the scientific method is "Too Complex" for the average 12th grader to understand (including several teachers! in mathematics and sciences), but I really have to question what we are doing as a country if we don't think the vast majority of our citizenry should have a fundamental grasp of what scientists do. When you don't teach the how and why of science, it seems like "magic." And "magic" and "voodoo" and fairy dust is all really easy to brush off for not being understood.

And honestly, if you can't read a scientific research paper in your area of study and explain it by the time you leave college, what did you learn?

I like that!

My father, a highly educated and successful man who never finished High School, was adamant that education at a minimum teach students to educate themselves. If it fails to do that it is useless, there is always more to learn, though it does challenge the institution to not try to proselytize. Even a superficial vision of the scientific method is a decent filter to use on the world.

Putting stuff to use in the real world (While I took geometry classes, I actually learned it in Jr High wood shop) is useful too. A lot of my students had heads full of abstract ideas which felt comfortably intellectual but were in reality too fuzzy to use and actually protected them from learning. I'm thinking about writing classes here, applying actual experiences of emotion and observations of people's behavior was always a fight. First I had to excavate my way through layers of theory and cool aloof pseudo something or other. Once that was out of the way we could get into looking at actual behavior, how people expend their calories (like the line "follow the money" from All the President's Men, if you follow the calories you always find truth), and what people are really deep down trying to do. Turning my writing students loose observing the behavior of the people around them was a bit like building something where you had to find a hypotenuse or circumference, a lesson in reality and pretty fun too.

But we may have done better when schools insisted on a deep understanding of the fundamentals. Creative writing may have been one of the places where universities started to go wrong in what they taught. Looking back it seems there's lots of stuff that should come first. I wonder if what we teach now isn't a mixture of subjects and approaches that are both too basic and too advanced, high school and graduate studies. Certainly, many of my students were a fascinating brew of the sophisticated and the remedial.

I really hope Lizzie's right but it's not what I've seen while they are actually in college. I'm happy to have them be as radical as they want, just so it's their radicalism. A skepticism even cynicism about the adult world should always include those edifices of the establishment, our educational institutions.

 

[sheeplady]

But we may have done better when schools insisted on a deep understanding of the fundamentals. Creative writing may have been one of the places where universities started to go wrong in what they taught. Looking back it seems there's lots of stuff that should come first. I wonder if what we teach now isn't a mixture of subjects and approaches that are both too basic and too advanced, high school and graduate studies. Certainly, many of my students were a fascinating brew of the sophisticated and the remedial. .

I think there's also a basic set of cultural fundamentals that every student should have, too. For instance, I don't think you should be able to get out of a United States high school (and definitely not college) without having read some Harper Lee, Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc. I think you ought to read something by Plato in college and some early American authors as well. And have read the constitution before you graduate high school.

I do not have a liberal art's degree (all of my degrees were science or philosophy based), but I don't think a person can be truly "educated" if they haven't read the foundational fiction and non-fiction books of our society.

Honestly, seeing some of the stuff I see posted on Facebook about the Common Core math, I'm getting really concerned about *what* they are teaching in schools. And I say this as someone who looks at the problems and I understand what they are trying to teach kids (the ability to estimate in their heads, understand placeholders, etc.). But often it is way beyond the ability level of the student at that grade level and quite clear that the teacher doesn't know how to teach it effectively. Which is the fault of an administrative system that doesn't prepare teachers how to teach not new content, but an entirely different way of thinking about numbers.

 

[MikeKardec]

I was pretty disappointed in the college teachers, professors, what have you, when I did my few teaching gigs. I expected that their level of education, mostly Phd., and their exposure to all sorts of additional education and confronting educational problems and figuring them out would have created some sophisticated minds. What I saw was a bunch of people (with a few notable exceptions) who were really just spewing forth what they had learned a decade or two before. Probably a carbon copy of a carbon copy. The material I'd learned as "new" (my school prided itself on being Avant Garde) was still being reprocessed and it wasn't new when I learned it either. The level of knowledge was so thin I had professors cut loose on me about Communism who barely knew who Trotsky was (to their slight credit they weren't specialists in Russian/Soviet history but their classes did deal with things like theater and film in the USSR)!

More on the subject of professors just being silly idealists rather outright than incompetent here's a story: One of my teaching colleagues created an amazing piece of performance art with her students. She performed it at the college and then, somehow, was invited to recreate it for a 10 day run at La Mama in NYC (one of the premiere experimental theater venues in the country) ... this is all a pretty amazing situation and the kind of thing we should applaud. So I was sitting around with several professors and a bunch of the cast, all excited about the upcoming adventure, and one of the students asks me:

"You worked in New York, what should I do there when I'm not performing?"

For me this was easy, I said: "You want to be a professional dancer. Go on some auditions. Even if you can't take the job, the experience of auditioning when you can have the confidence to say, 'I'm currently performing at La Mama,' will be something you may not be able to repeat for some time. You need to feel that confidence because it will be something you need to channel when you can't get a job and you feel like they hate you in every audition you go to."

Before I'd stopped speaking one of her professors pipes up and, wagging a finger in the air, he crows: "NO! Create you own theater!" Meaning, I suspect, 'don't sell out,' don't ever work professionally, live in a bubble of pure and unsullied academic bliss like me! Or possibly, try to live off of grants as an under grad dancer either in a city that will eat you alive or in a small town (where we were at the time) where no one will ever see your work. *Sigh.*

I realized then that many of these academics who had been taught by academics none of whom had ever spent a moment living and working off campus were just severely limited and sadly naive. I wanted to comfort the guy but he wouldn't have gotten it. If we have to have our youth taught by people with such limited vision and simplistic idealism (and I accept that we may), they should come with a warning label: "Some of what these people tell you is worthy of consideration ... the rest is a giant pile." The test that life will grade you on is when you take them seriously and when you don't.

The greatest problem I saw in my students, and a problem I had myself for WAY too long after I graduated, was that college professors had convinced us we were too good for the world ... combined with the natural arrogance of youth it was a perfect way to keep us from advancing in our fields and learning from our peers. I suspect we've been seeing some of those 'too good' students objecting to the dirty world on campuses this Fall. There should be a class: Managing Expectations: the Form and Content of Existence in the Post Modern Age.

 

[Foxer55]

My own view on this is that the nature of education itself is being affected by a sea change in culture, technology, and global circumstances. Education is becoming less valued and more important at the same time. Our national culture and western culture is undergoing enormous challenges that are contributing to accessing university education more based on social standards rather than academic standards. Add to this many instructors have become political activists in lieu of academics and this is degrading education and degrees from previously esteemed institutions.

Meanwhile, technology is becoming more complex and is changing the way education is actually conducted using IT technology as a tool that, sometimes, is not as seemingly effective as actually teaching students face-to-face. Some previously esteemed institutions have actually become more esteemed because they are using and teaching technology better, e.g., technical schools such as MIT, Texas Tech, and Cal Tech. Liberal Arts schools are suffering from watered down standards.

At the same time, there seems to be an attack on western culture and the institutions that previously educated students under western values. Social/political activism is undermining western values that were being taught in the past. One thing I'm reminded of is Camille Paglia's comments in one of her writings that she is thankful she had the benefit of learning based on the principles of old, dead, white men. In many other cultures, as a woman, she never would have gotten even the benefit of an education. But there is a growing social animus toward teaching both the knowledge and teaching with the methods of old, dead white men of western history. How many non-western cultures teach on the basis of research and deliberation that became the foundation of western culture?

 

[Harp]

... there seems to be an attack on western culture and the institutions that previously educated students under western values.

Bowdoin is perhaps emblematic of the charge against western culture. A benefactor solicit and the college president had a golf date
argument over curriculum, which led to further acrimony and a subsequent report criticizing the school's administration and faculty;
somewhat reminiscent of William Buckley's classic God and Man at Yale.

 

[philosophygirl78]

This isn't the first time I've seen this, and it probably won't be the last, but as a student who had received his Associates in the liberal arts a couple years back, and now working on his bachelors in journalism... the liberal arts and sciences have become so much more than they used to be. Sure, you still have the art majors, the painters, musicians, philosophers, day dream believers, and English majors (the kind of studies even I don't see how one could make a career of), but now.. you also have the sciences thrown in with these guys. Your historians, your chemists, physicists, mathematicians... the kind of people who built the atomic bomb! You have your engineers, your economists, your geologists, your climatologists, your computing technicians, the people who built the tech that got us to the Moon. Frankly, I believe the liberal arts, unless you become a physicist or economist, are vastly under appreciated and under funded. Far too many people going for mundane business degrees because that's what they feel they must do, rather than pushing their potential, pushing their minds, and doing what they want to do. The "easy" route is almost always never the right one.

Very well said. Agreed.

 

[philosophygirl78]

I was nervous when I wrote that and you are right to caution us. It can be seen as political and I want to be careful (just call me out on it or delete this post if it seems inappropriate) but I find myself more interested in just the aspect of consumer relations.

Is there an issue about getting what you pay for? Actually, the issue is even more significant than that, it has become "What Are You Paying For?" If paying for a traditional academic education that will open your mind, aid job placement (either through vocational training or though rigorous intellectual exercise) and allow you to experience the world of thought in a manner that gives you many alternatives, is what you are after, is it appropriate to be sold something else? Especially, if you don't bother to discern or don't have the capacity to discern what the alternatives might be. I applaud the idea of students engaging with progressive ideas (I've disseminated a few of them myself) but I also would want the schools to be clear about what the deal is ... if an expensive "activist camp" is what the students really want then it is fine to let them pay for it. As long as they recognize the limitations and call it what it is.

Actually, I believe that a good deal of the stress the students are showing is because they know that they are paying a great deal to live in a world (college) that is much like the way they would like the real world to be. Many of them don't want to prepare for that real world by studying the sort of things that would actually change it for the better -- as in we only need one student to come up with something like cold fusion that actually works or creates a economic theory, like socialism, that serves people of differing political tastes equally and dissolves some of our current left/right differences.

Many current students seem to be demanding that others create a world that they'll be comfortable in by removing things that could be disturbing for them (like the 1st Amendment) without having the intellectual discipline (without the schools requiring the intellectual discipline) to see that could also lead to the opposite of what they want. They have a lot of fear. I get it, growing up is scary. But a good education could alleviate some of that fear and help them to construct a reality that mitigates much of the rest. First, however, they would have to open their minds and learn; take classes that are hard, require a good deal of thought, and dissect the writings of the many intelligent people who have come before. Revolutions that call for change without a plan for living constructively and realistically with that change are destined to end in horror.

I have a nagging feeling I may be being a hypocrite but at the moment I'm staring blankly at the screen and not seeing it. I'm sure someone will let me know. Do realize these are just things that I'm thinking. It's a process and in an hour I might have a different opinion on my own or someone else might lead me to one.

Life on college campuses is not reality, that is true. However, I do think it is necessary to provide students some level of protection and isolation when engaged in the search for higher knowledge. A sort of rite of passage if you will. Where I see a problem, is when the establishment uses that protection bubble as a way to further political and elite interest agendas by cultivating a populace of self entitlement and delusional ideologies that at the end of the day serve to create sheep and a culture with the ill fate of disappointment.

 

[MikeKardec]

Life on college campuses is not reality, that is true. However, I do think it is necessary to provide students some level of protection and isolation when engaged in the search for higher knowledge. A sort of rite of passage if you will. Where I see a problem, is when the establishment uses that protection bubble as a way to further political and elite interest agendas by cultivating a populace of self entitlement and delusional ideologies that at the end of the day serve to create sheep and a culture with the ill fate of disappointment.

I like the idea of there being the safety to encounter and engage controversial things as opposed to the current vision of safety from controversial things. If a student doesn't like something they should be well trained to produce a devastatingly well reasoned response that communicates directly with whatever entity originated the thing they didn't like. They absolutely need a certain amount of protection to practice interacting with things that in the outer world they will need protection from as well as how to question themselves.

That's the thing that has gone to the dogs, college offering students the security to think personally dangerous thoughts (even if it's only to reject them), argue things they don't believe in (even if it's only to find a way to communicate with people who believe different things) and connect with people they don't agree with (because that's going to be the world they'll be faced with). All that scary stuff!