Posted on 10/28/2023 4:36:23 AM PDT by karpov
Higher education is in a bad way these days. One encounters many metaphors for its current state. It’s a bubble, about to burst. It’s a pyramid scheme. A college degree is a signal to prospective employers and little more. Rarely do these metaphors bode well for an institution through which over 60 percent of Americans pass on their way to adulthood.
Perhaps we should add one more metaphor that may help account for some of the others: Is college a cult?
During the years I lived in Japan, I regularly interacted with members of what many people would label cults. Train stations were popular locations for recruitment. I was not a spiritual seeker, but I sorely needed language practice, and these folks wanted to talk. Where most commuters ignored their overtures, I would stop whenever I had time to spare. My conversation skills benefited as much from the countless hours spent in conversation with Jehovah’s Witnesses and members of New Age sects like Tenchi Seikyo, Mahikari, and Happy Science as from those spent studying a textbook.
So I’ve studied lots of cults up close and personal, though I’ve never been involved in one. Then again, cult members are usually unaware that they’ve joined a cult. Did I unwittingly join one when I took a job at a small liberal-arts college? It would be a perverse irony, inasmuch as colleges and universities pride themselves on fostering robust debate and open inquiry and encouraging their students to challenge authority and speak truth to power—not exactly the top priorities that come to mind when one thinks of cults.
Hence my unease when I started noticing things that conjured memories of Shibuya Station circa 1993.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
It has been suggested that colleges and universities have experienced revolutions wherein management control (with all its power) was taken from professors by administrators who, having little interest in actual education, undertook programs to spread their influence by seeding students with their ideology (i.e., Marxism).
This explains why at Harvard, for example, there are 2,600 more administrators than undergrads.
They all had their experimental Vax which was not actually a Vax until the definition of Vax was changed. Cult yes.
No Vax no school.
Advice to freshmen: just tell them you’re autistic. They’ll treat you like a shaman.
I think if people really want higher education, they’re better off going to trade school.
""Citing examples is like shooting fish in a barrel. One professor identifies Jesus as a masochistic “drag king.” An education department proposes abolishing the word “field” because it evokes memories of slavery. Hundreds of scholars conduct a witch hunt against a philosopher for publishing a heavily-footnoted article in a peer-reviewed journal, on the grounds that she “enacts violence and perpetuates harm” by using “phrases like ‘male genitalia.’” Entire courses are devoted to zombies and cryptozoology. University-supported research papers find that pigeons are connoisseurs of modern art and that unicorns might exist in another universe. While some of these cases are relatively frivolous, others—expressions of unhinged anti-Semitism, for example—are more disturbing.""
Scary stuff!
The kid who does our landscaping is a senior in high school. His dad set him up in business with good equipment, but the best thing his dad gave him is an excellent work ethic. If you try to tip him, he refuses it and says to put it in the offering at church.
He hired a crew, and is managing the business end of things, with his parents’ guidance.
I guess his parents thought their money was better spent this way than sending him to a liberal college.
Colleges have tapped into an abundant resource that has unlimited potential, exploiting the Dunning-Kruger Effect. As the saying goes, genius has its limitations, but stupidity not so much.
Yikes,
Only one of my kids did the full college route. He went to a very small private engineering school filled with geeks.
There was none of that garbage. My wife went with him to help move his stuff mainly because he didn’t have enough space in his car. The orientation was traditional. A college tour and review of the apartment rules.
There treated the adult students as adults. The college doesn’t have a dorm, they do have an apartment building. Want to eat? Better go to the store and buy some food and cook it then. Classes start Monday at 8am.
The only sports they had was an intramural Ultimate team. My son was eventually team President.
There was no diversity department. He shared his apartment with five other guys, some white, some black. They all became close friends with out the need for external help.
Collegiate secret societies are - and always have been - feeders for the global Intelligence superstructure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collegiate_secret_societies_in_North_America
Well over 100 listed here.
I am the only one in my group of friends that did not attend college. Whenever we get together, either stag or with wives present, the conversation will involve a college anecdote within the first 20 minutes. I have stopped even wanting to meet new people, as the initial questions invariably include “where did you go to school?” FCOL, that was forty years ago. What does it matter? Have you done nothing worthwhile since then?
The whole public education system from K through 12 has been a cult for many years. Berkeley and Stanford started creating cult indoctrination professionals in the 70s and it spread across the nation like a cancer.
Don't forget "symbols" (flags, bumper stickers, slogans, colors, posters, and the like).
A college degree is like a US quarter. Those granted before a certain date have real value. Those after a certain date, not so much. With quarters(and dimes and half dollars) that date is 1964. 90 % silver in 1964 and before. 1965 and after looks similar but largely worthless.
I don’t know what the date of demarcation is for college degrees but I’ll wager is not much later than 1980.
“... they’re better off going to trade school.”
Both of my sons graduated with STEM degrees a few years back. Both feel that ‘wokeness’ was not very pervasive in curiculums that deal with hard facts as do the STEM curriculums. Of course the same cannot be said for just about everything else that Big Ed offers such as law, general business, etc and any ‘studies’ program.
This was my conclusion after attending University of Michigan and Michigan State in the late 80’s/early 90’s. And of course it is much, much worse now.
Depends on the school and the major, but by the late 1980s, pretty much worthless outside of serious Engineering Schools. And those have begun to crumble...
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