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There Goes Another One
I had a strange college experience; while I watched all of my classmates become more liberal thanks to the indoctrination on campus, I found myself veering much further to the Right. While classes were canceled so students could protest, I found myself hanging out with James O’Keefe & company (of Project Veritas fame), hanging out around the Centurion office listening to their latest antics. Perhaps my move to the Right was due to my rebellious nature; I don’t want to go along with the crowd. I’m not sure how you can watch one of his earliest videos and not feel as though something profoundly stupid has infected our college campuses,
The video that got all of this started–I secretly filmed Rutgers administrators agreeing to ban Lucky Charms from the school cafeteria. Happy St. Patrick's day! Full video: https://t.co/rlDuqt7i0A pic.twitter.com/i9eUREEvf5
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) March 17, 2018
I was the exception though; most of my classmates walked out of Rutgers far more liberal than they walked in. And the chances of staying pro-Israel for Jewish students weren’t terribly great either. One of the most disappointing moments was watching the former Rutgers Hillel president go on a brainwashing trip to Israel with a group of progressive pro-Palestinian activists and come back an entirely different person. That incident came to mind when I saw this story out of Michigan.
Benjamin Gerstein was once a pro-Israel high school student from a strong Zionist family:
Then, the University of Michigan happened.
There has to be another way for parents who want their children to get a college education but don’t want to pay a quarter of a million dollars to lose them to progressivism. For Jewish parents, it’s a double whammy; they aren’t just turning against their parents’ politics and morality, they’re turning against Zionism and the homeland of the Jewish people. Programs like Birthright Israel, which send students on a free ten-day trip are a great positive introduction to Israel. But on days like today all of the efforts to combat indoctrination on college campuses feel like bailing a sinking cruise ship out with a teacup.
Published in General
My oldest daughter got an Associate of Science degree at our local technical college before heading off for her four-year degree. It was her way of proving to us she could do the work before we spent the big bucks for her BS. It helped that she went into a technical major (Math and Computer Science), so there’s less indoctrination other than the mandatory liberal arts courses.
My guess is when these kids with mountains of student debt reach the point their children are thinking of college, they may tell them either choose a technical major, go to a two-year technical school, or don’t go at all.
Oops! Forgot the fourth option: develop a really good three-point shot . . .
There is. Hillsdale. Although, I admit, it’s odd that you have to send your child to a Christian school to safeguard their Jewish identity and loyalty, but that’s the world we’re living in. Topsy turvy.
I had Jewish friends who also sent their kids to a Christian school. No problemo . . .
We get worked up about lots of things, but who is actually radically changing our schools? Our schools are the fundamental socialist piece of our system and are changing everything. They should not be centralized by states and certainly not by the nation through the unions. They should all be decentralized, run like New Zealand, who went from the worst schools in the west to just below Finland and Singapore almost over night by eliminating the bureaucratic super structure and letting teachers and parents run each one of them separately. Why on earth do we think that socialism works for something as fundamental as education?
One good thing about progressives — they don’t reproduce.
We were just re-watching The Hunger Games last night. This reminds me of when The Capitol brainwashed Peta Melark…
I don’t even think it’s the education at college.
I think it’s that people want to be liked.
For guys they want to get laid.
The only thing that will turn people off at college quicker than being religious or Republican is telling people you don’t drink.
I hit the trifecta. Mr. Popularity.
Yes!! Burn down the superstructure!
Sometimes they do. By accident, maybe?
There are people out there who live their own lives in a conservative fashion, but support leftist causes and vote accordingly (“Who am I to tell others how to live?”).
Yes, but they’re losing the demographic war over time to conservative traditionalists like the Catholic families I know with 10 kids. Now if we could stop them converting our kids, we might really get somewhere!
I’d be interested to know how the parents of the students prepped them at home for what they would see and hear in college, in terms of being skeptical and applying critical thinking. If you don’t have any least some cautionary warnings inputted into you over questioning the motives of authority when it comes to political matters (if you’re not naturally hard-wired that way), you may go into college feeling totally credulous about anything you’re taught.
For students at Rutgers, especially Jewish students who more likely than not in the NYC area, come from liberal (if not progressive) families, a failure to go into questioning the motives of the political types is a way to quickly get caught up in their motives, and go from your parents’ moderate liberalism into radical progressivism (and the outside bombardment of political ideas from third parties online in the media has an effect as well, and that’s outside the NYC area — my friend’s 20-year-old here in West Texas has decided he’s a Bernie Bro, but he’s having trouble dealing with contradictions like Wednesday’s comment by Bloomberg about Sanders being a millionaire socialist with three homes. Someone like that’s probably still salvageable as they get into the workforce, but the types who hardcore radicalize in college are likely going to spend the next half-century of their lives as the angry True Believers).
You are going to hate this, but it works.
Have your kids spend the first two years of college in a community college that they can attend from home. Tuition is so low they can go without incurring debt.
Transfer to a four-year school after getting all the freshman and sophomore credits they need for a four year degree at the CC (including as much of the “cultural diversity” nonsense as is possible).
Unless the student has a clear idea of the career they wish to follow, and generally unless it is a true profession (engineering, law, medicine) rather than a trade gussied up as a “profession” (teaching and communications are prime examples) have them finish their four-year degree at a commuter college (for example in Houston one of the University of Houston campuses), preferably a state school. Again, this keeps costs down.
Only go to a “prestige” school for true professions or if you can attend without borrowing money. And only if the school is worth the degree. (Example – in Texas, Texas A&M and University of Texas-Dallas have engineering schools worth paying extra for.) That gives you a four-year degree from the prestige school, because no one cares where the student attended the first two years of college.
Since they remain close to home, the most pernicious effects of brainwashing can be nullified by parental attention. Plus they do not end up as debt peons owing $300K in student loan debt they cannot discharge through bankruptcy for a worthless degree.
Also, if a child only intends to attend college “because that is what all their friends are doing,” consider steering them towards getting a two-year degree in a skilled trade that pays $40K-$80K upon receipt of the AA or AS. They graduate with a useful job skill and no debt, can begin an adult career and pick up the 4-year degree (nights and weekends, even) when they are ready for it. (I got my MBA through night school.)
I am pleased that I cannot relate to this. I raise my kids to be contrarians – though it might run in the blood. We swim against just about any prevailing current. Even here on Ricochet, I have been known to defend Harvey Weinstein just because everyone was piling on. Ditto Volkswagen and the diesel emissions, arguing that the coronavirus is overblown, etc.
I hate and fear any mob, even one comprised of Good Guys. And my kids, I am proud to say, do the same. They go to non-Jewish schools, and wear their kippahs and peyus with pride. If other people are doing it, that is good reason to treat “it” with instinctive suspicion.
Parents need support from schools. Classical education charters using Core Knowledge/Cultural Literacy (E.D. Hirsch) curricula are even better than most parochial schools at teaching critical thinking. Public schools are hopeless, unless they’re relatively rural where parents and teachers have more influence. But, educrats are having more and more toxic effect even there (from my sister-in-law’s experience).
I went to public school in Manhattan, where my first brush with overt indoctrination came in eighth grade, with my Social Studies teacher, who had come directly to the NYC school system from the Ford Foundation, and decided he was going to change our collective weltanschauung by showing us the oppressive, dark side of American/western civilization. So we ended up hearing about the evils of Caucasians, where I got in trouble by asking aren’t Russians Caucasians because the Caucuses are in part of the Soviet Union?
I was going to fail the first semester for questioning authority, until a parental conference with the principal forced a regrading because I had been doing my work; I just hadn’t been parroting back the preferred answers. Very eye-opening for an eighth grader, and others in the class also were wary of the lessons they were being taught because he was so aggressively pushing the ideology down our throats. But more tactful ideologues might have done a better job in getting away with it, and there’s no doubt that almost 50 years down the line, there are more public school teachers who come to their jobs looking to indoctrinate.
It looks like O’Keefe channeled his blarney… Is there such a thing as a “green” pill?
With the advent of the Internet and social media, there has been an increasing focus on pop culture. We are literally drowning in media. Netflix itself has so many movies and TV shows that even if you try to keep up with all the New Hot Things, you can’t.
In addition, the increased pressure to have the sinecure that comes with a college education has reduced the intellectual rigor in the academy. So students who are not academically qualified are sitting in classrooms looking for something to do that is not too difficult and not too dry.
This is where Critical Theory comes in. English classes — from High School through the required college courses — typically come in the form of literature criticism. And, of course, Critical Theory applies the same sort of worldview to literally everything.
But as any student or debater knows, this is not a process in which one arrives at a conclusion from evidence. Just the opposite. One starts with the conclusion and retrofits an argument. One also sees this in the Social Sciences (in the Social Scientific Method, if the data contradict the hypothesis, you must reject the data) and increasingly in the Natural Sciences.
Hence we get the current genre of “Current Popular Thing is Problematic.” Ignoring the nature of what sins “Problematic” consists of, the tiresome argument is the same, whether it be about the newest potential cinematic blockbuster or the annual explanation of the horrors surrounding Thanksgiving. It’s not just clickbait, it’s formulaic and it comes from the Humanities Academy.
The current Liberal Arts model of education is one that is best suited for the acculturation of an elite class. It gives them a common set of literature and scientific knowledge about which they can converse. This system is wholly unsuited for large masses of people who can never be elite but who need to obtain credentials for employment. And without a canon (Western or otherwise), it doesn’t even satisfy the needs of acculturation.
Big Education has lost the plot, focused entirely on handing out degrees and unconcerned if those degrees mean anything other than having been accepted 4+ years ago.
In the era of rising university costs, STEM emphasis, and ruthless international competition, I propose the following simple reform:
End breadth requirements.
(1) You already had enough breadth in high school. That’s what high school is for. You don’t need more high school after high school.
(2) They often permit a wide variety of courses, and the typical student seeks out the easiest one, defeating the purpose.
(3) Breadth requirements permit the weakest academic fields a steady revenue as these “easy A” courses pay for the rest of the field.
(4) There is an asymmetry in requirements. Any science requirements frequently permit very “soft” sciences and even then these are watered-down courses not taken by majors.
(5) In going from 4 to 3 years, I just cut your student debt by 25%. You’re welcome!
Feelings…nothing more than Feelings….