Lower Education

      Comments Off on Lower Education

Three more bits of evidence supporting my contention that the typical modern college experience is harmful for Christians.

There is overwhelming political bias on campuses. Affirmative action is shamelessly practiced, the ROTC and military recruiters are banned, “heteronormativity” is rebuked, atheism and skepticism are the norm, Marxism and socialism are held in high regard, and males are outnumbered by females 58 to 42 percent.

For 40 years straight middle-class bourgeois households have been shipping their conservative, patriotic, church-going kids off to college and spending a fortune to turn them, four years later, into socialists, atheists, sexual libertines, drug users, and despisers of the United States and Western culture. All of this has been subsidized by the Federal government and enforced by the courts.

Reference: Michael Filozof, an adjunct professor at Niagara County Communiity College

More of today’s students come to campus with dreadful study habits. Too few of them read for pleasure. Too many drink and smoke excessively. They are terribly ill-prepared for four years of hard work, and most dangerously, they do not think that college should be arduous. Instead they perceive college as an overnight recreation center in which they exercise, eat, and in between playing extracurricular sports, they carry books around. If a professor is lucky, the books are being skimmed hours before class.

How do I know that my concerns are not unique to my employer, or my classroom? My students are brutally honest – they tell me with candor and without shame that their peers think of college as a four year cruise without a destination.

Reference: “I’m Leaving”

And finally, Wendell Berry’s magnificent essay “The Loss of the University”.  I could not find it online.  It’s in his essay collection – Home Economics .  Mr. Berry reminds us that the word “educate” literally means “to lead forth”.  Into what does the modern college lead students?  Students are indeed being lead.  Evidence is mounting that the destination is not to a higher understanding of wisdom, but to a lower way of life.