Thoughts on liberal arts and the higher-education bubble.
Category Archives: Education
What The Occupiers Believe And Why They Believe It
It’s indoctrination:
During the 2008 campaign, Obama’s critics often called him a “radical,” a “socialist” or even a “Marxist” and were either dismissed as hysterics or condemned for “McCarthyism.” It was not widely noted that, for those too young to remember America’s Cold War struggle against Soviet tyranny, the accusation of “Marxism” doesn’t carry much weight, while “McCarthyism” is at most something they’ve read about in books. (Stan Evans’s Blacklisted by History probably isn’t on the collegiate reading list.) Voters who were 25 in 2008 were in first grade when the Berlin Wall came down. If they have some idea that the Soviet empire was a bad thing, they have little idea of why it was bad. And this ignorance is no accident.
To explain why the Bolshevik experiment failed so spectacularly would require that students be taught the errors of socialism, which would necessarily require an explanation of the superiority of the market economy to the socialist planned economy. And the left-wing orientation of today’s academic establishment — “Down With Capitalist Education!” to quote a sign in a protest today by Cal State university faculty — pretty much prohibits any such explanation.
Seventeen-year-olds taught that they are “the 99 percent” and that advocates of economic freedom are “f–king up our future” have not been merely miseducated, but have been quite literally indoctrinated. But as Buckley said, they would be “outraged by the suggestion” that they have not arrived at their beliefs “by independent intellectual exertion.”
These young people have not been taught Marx and Lenin. Rather, they have had their heads stuffed with nebulous ideas about “equality,” “rights” and “social justice” by teachers (and journalists and movie producers) who cherish romantic mythology about the righteous glories of Sixties radical movements.
The other problem is that Marxism is an emotionally appealing argument, to those who have never been taught how to actually think.
[Update a while later]
“The putrid stench of a century of folk Marxism.”
The Brain-Dead Left
Thoughts on their intellectual exhaustion and maleducation:
To our mind, that sentence more than anything we’ve read encapsulates the spirit of Obamaville. It originally appeared in a San Francisco Chronicle story about an incident in which “dozens of college students” invaded a Bank of America Branch, “pitching a tent and chanting ‘shame, shame’ until they were arrested.”
On the way to B of A, they paused at Citi to scream at the walls. These are college students, acting like 2-year-olds throwing a tantrum. What does that tell you about their critical thinking skills–and about the standards of American higher education? The likes of the New York Times expect us to take such incoherent spasms of rage seriously as a political “movement.” What does that tell us about the standards of the liberal media?
Pretty much everything we need to know.
The Higher-Ed Bubble
A professor tells it like it is.
Lessons From The Battle Of BlogCon 2011
The Occumorons deserve derision:
…we learned that their personal hygiene leaves much to be desired – like, well, personal hygiene. We learned that their concept of private property is shaky at best; radio host Tony Katz hilariously schooled one shaggy gentleman on the air at length about who owned a particular chair the Occupier attempted to occupy. And we learned that they wear Guy Fawkes masks not because of any particular affinity for the noted radical Catholic terrorist but because some guy wore it in the movie V For Vendetta and it was apparently a really bitchin’ movie.
These are not deep thinkers.
But the most important lesson is that the Occupiers are a joke; they are nothing but coddled, Potemkin protesters who collapse at the first sign of resistance.
These clowns have been treated with kid gloves by gutless (or even sympathetic) politicians from Zuccotti Park to the Port of Oakland. They’ve been allowed to live in filth, dominate public spaces and generally descend into a festering petri dish of social, criminal and epidemiological pathologies by cowardly mayors and other enablers unwilling to do the most basic job of any government leader and keep order.
The mainstream media adores them, viewing them as advancing their shared left-wing agenda while also recalling the activist Sixties of legend. And, of course, the media helpfully covers up the ever-growing roster of outrages perpetrated by these nimrods. No accountability there. Even the cops are required to treat these geniuses with professional respect.
It’s been all up-twinkles for them – until now.
Not to paint a couple of botched protests as the Battle of Stalingrad, but when these idiots rushed into the midst of the assembled conservative new media folks gathered at BlogCon 2011, it was about the first time anyone ever took these cretins on en masse.
They ran into an impenetrable wall of mockery, and they had no clue what to do. They folded like a house of stinky cards.
The foundation of the success of the Occupiers is the tacit agreement by the elite to treat them with respect, to take their incoherent assemblage of bad ideas seriously, and to ignore the fact that the emperor’s new clothes are dirty, clichéd and have Che’s mug emblazoned on them.
The BlogCon folks didn’t.
They did not play along. They showed no respect. Instead, they went on the offense, kept on the offense, and turned the Occupiers’ strengths against them. It was awesome.
Read the whole report.
[Monday morning update]
“The whole world is laughing.”
[Bumped]
“Sugar Coding”
…your home-schooled moron.
As is often the case, these people lack a sense of irony.
The Penn State Cover-Ups
It wasn’t just child molestation:
Although State Senator Piccola had written to Penn State President Spanier asking him to ensure that “the university must deploy its fullest resources to conduct an investigation of this case”, the Inquiry Committee decided that the investigation committee should not investigate three of the four charges “synthesized” by the inquiry committee and, as a result, despite the request of Piccola and others, no investigation was ever carried out Penn State on any of the key issues e.g the “trick… to hide the decline”, Mann’s role in the email deletion enterprise organised by Phil Jones or the failure to report adverse data which the House Energy and Commerce Committee had asked about (but not investigated by the NAS panel, whose terms of reference were sabotaged by Ralph Cicerone, President of NAS).
This latest malfeasance in Not-So-Happy Valley makes the whitewash of Michael Mann look even less credible.
The Five Most Infantile Beliefs
No, Not Everyone Should Go To College
The Occupiers
…are blaming the wrong people:
It’s not the greedy Wall Street bankers who destroyed these people’s hopes. It’s the virtueocracy itself. It’s the people who constructed a benefit-heavy entitlement system whose costs can no longer be sustained. It’s the politicians and union leaders who made reckless pension promises that are now bankrupting cities and states. It’s the socially progressive policy-makers in the U.S. who declared that everyone, even those with no visible means of support, should be able to own a home with no money down, courtesy of their government. In Canada, it’s the social progressives who assure us we can keep on consuming all the health care we want, even as the costs squeeze out other public goods.
The Occupiers are right when they say our system of wealth redistribution is broken. But they’re wrong about what broke it. The richest 1 per cent are not exactly starving out the working poor. (In the U.S., half all income sent to Washington is redistributed to the elderly, sick and disabled, or to those who serve them, and nearly half the country lives in a household that’s getting some sort of government benefit.) The problem is, our system redistributes the wealth from young to old, and from middle-class workers in the private sector to inefficient and expensive unions in the public sector.
Among the biggest beneficiaries of this redistribution is the higher-education industry. In Canada, we subsidize it directly. In the U.S., it’s subsidized by a vast system of student loans, which have allowed colleges to jack up tuition to sky-high levels. U.S. student debt has hit the trillion-dollar mark. Both systems crank out too many sociologists and too few mechanical engineers. These days, even law-school graduates are having trouble finding work. That’s because the supply has increased far faster than the demand.
It was madness, and yet so many want to continue it.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Mark Steyn:
America is seizing up before our eyes: The decrepit airports, the underwater property market, the education racket, the hyper-regulated business environment. Yet curiously the best example of this sclerosis is the alleged “revolutionary” movement itself. It’s the voice of youth, yet everything about it is cobwebbed. It’s more like an open-mike karaoke night of a revolution than the real thing. I don’t mean just the placards with the same old portable quotes by Lenin et al., but also, say, the photograph in Forbes of Rachel, a 20-year-old “unemployed cosmetologist” with remarkably uncosmetological complexion, dressed in pink hair and nose ring as if it’s London, 1977, and she’s killing time at Camden Lock before the Pistols gig. Except that that’s three and a half decades ago, so it would be like the Sex Pistols dressing like the Andrews Sisters. Are America’s revolting youth so totally pathetically moribund they can’t even invent their own hideous fashion statements? Last weekend, the nonagenarian Commie Pete Seeger was wheeled out at Zuccotti Park to serenade the oppressed masses with “If I Had a Hammer.” As it happens, I do have a hammer. Pace Mr. Seeger, they’re not that difficult to acquire, even in a recession. But, if I took it to Zuccotti Park, I doubt very much anyone would know how to use it, or be able to muster the energy to do so.
Read all.