Replies

IMO the way to beat this rap is to re-define "serious academic pursuits" to fit the original reason people attended University: to become educated for life, not to learn a trade. Now that the adults are regaining control of North America, we need to encourage the same techniques that brought us to this impasse in the beginning: question the 'relevance' of the subject matter to the reason we are at University. Will "womens' studies" improve my relationship to the world, or will a Great Books seminar using the same Great Books list we used to use when women didn't work and book clubs flourished? When book clubs are established, we need to encourage the reading of 'relevant' books that will bring the culture together, not subdivide it. Critical thinking must be brought back to 'relevance', along with spelling, vocabulary, the dictionary, and the fact that words have meanings that can be nailed down. We must point out the many, many occasions on which people say "tow the line" and not "toe the line", "wreckless driving" and not "reckless driving", "poured over the documents" and not "pored over...", "baited breath" and not "bated breath", etc. -- and explain what the phrase means; we must teach people where such phrases come from as "He justs at scars that never felt a wound"; and above all we must work hard to get blasphemy, profanity and obscenity back to the fringes of society. All of these are things we as individual educated people can do. (I do them daily, as my work requires a lot of writing and reading and arguing). Auditing classes is a good idea too. I took a night course in Economics for a CLE credit, in which the majority of the students were working people, and the professor was frequently interrupted by someone pointing out that "that doesn't work in reality" or "I have never seen anything like that in my business". Finally the professor exploded that reality had nothing to do with it -- we were there to learn what was in the book and pass the exam at the end! That opened the eyes of the students who were not involved in daily business and several good after-class dialogues began.

Another thing that needs to be brought back to the university is requiring on-campus living for the first two years. Being forced together with people who don't believe as you believe, and having the tools to argue and debate in 'bull sessions' in an informal atmosphere (and with the aforementioned marginalization of obscenity, blasphemy and 'you are stupid' type rejoinders) would go a long way to opening the doors of closed minds that didn't even know they were closed. My dad, who was born and reared in Wisconsin, said the Army did more for the opening of closed minds than anything else he had ever experienced, forcing people to live togther and get along together who had vastly different ideas of the world. Dorm life did the same for me -- the only Republican in my dorm, as I remember it, but one taught to defend her position and well grounded to back pu her points-- and would help a lot of other young brainwashed high school kids.

But above all the need from parents is to take an active hand in where your children go to school. Like the woman who takes a six figure job and leaves the rearing of her children to an illegal alien from Guatamala, sending your kids to Harvard and ignoring what they are learning there is not doing them any good at all. You gave birth to them; you owe them your full attention until they are capable of standing on their own with the ability to hold their own with the world.