The following, in its entirety, from Dennis Prager.
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The following are some of the basic postulates about America, religion, society, morality, the arts and Israel that are taught at almost every American university.
America:
• The United States is no better than any other country, and in some important ways it is worse than many.
• On the world stage, America is an imperialist country, and domestically it mistreats its minorities and largely neglects its poor.
• “American exceptionalism” and overt displays of patriotism are examples of American chauvinism.
• America is a racist country. You white students are racist — and you either acknowledge this or you are in denial.
• Non-whites, however, cannot be racist — because whites have power and the powerless cannot be racist.
• The South votes Republican because it remains racist, and the Republican Party caters to that racism.
• Women are victims — of men. Blacks are victims — of whites. Latinos are victims — of Anglos. Muslims are victims — of Christians. Gays are victims — of straights.
• The American Founders were sexist, racist slaveholders whose primary concern was preserving their power and wealth.
• The original meaning and intent of the Constitution are either unknowable or irrelevant to today.
• The Electoral College should be abolished in order to transform America from a republic to a democracy.
• America’s dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was racist and a war crime.
Religion:
• God is at best a nonissue, and at worst a foolish and dangerous belief.
• Only people who reject science believe that the universe was designed.
• Religion has killed more people than any other idea, group or movement in human history.
• Christianity, in particular, has been a malevolent force, its history consisting largely of inquisitions, crusades, oppression and anti-intellectualism. Islam, on the other hand, is a religion of peace.
• Criticism of Christianity is therefore enlightened. Criticism of Islam, however, is a form of bigotry known on campus as Islamophobia.
• The good done by Christians in forming the Western world is not attributable to Christianity.
• Evil committed by Christians is due to Christianity. Evil committed by Muslims is not due to Islam.
Society and Morality:
• The reason for Third World poverty is that Western nations exploited Third World nations through colonialism and imperialism.
• The great moral conflicts are between the rich and the poor and between the powerful and the powerless, not between the good and the evil (that is dismissed as Manichaeism).
• The state is the most effective vehicle to creating a humane society. Therefore the larger the state, the more good it will do.
• Big corporations are bad. Big unions are good.
• Capitalism is rooted in selfishness and is structured to benefit the wealthy.
• Health care for profit is morally wrong.
• War is ignoble. Pacifism is noble.
• Human beings are animals, differing from “other animals” only in having more developed brains.
• Sexual orientation is biologically determined. Gender is not.
• Therefore, men and women, including mothers and fathers, are essentially interchangeable. The notions that married mothers and fathers are the parental ideal and that mothers and fathers bring unique things to a child are heterosexist and homophobic.
• The greatest vehicle for women’s happiness is career satisfaction, not marrying and making a family.
• The primary causes of criminal violence are poverty and racism.
• Man-made carbon emissions are dramatically heating up the planet, and this will lead to global catastrophe.
Arts and Literature:
• There is no actual meaning to a text. Texts mean what the reader perceives them to mean. [now where have we heard/read this one before? …. ed.]
• There is no better and worse in literature and the arts. The reason universities traditionally taught Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Bach — rather than, let us say, Guatemalan poets, Sri Lankan musicians and Native American storytellers — was not that they were the best but because of Western “Eurocentrism.”
Israel:
• Israel’s settlements on the West Bank are the primary cause of the Middle East conflict.
• Israel is an apartheid state, morally little different from apartheid South Africa.
Many readers agree and many will disagree with all or virtually all of these propositions. But these are the propositions that almost every university teaches students (outside the departments of business, math and the natural sciences).
Reporting on one study of college faculty, the Washington Post’s media reporter Howard Kurtz (himself a liberal), wrote: “At the most elite schools. … 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.” Kurtz went on to note that 84 percent of instructors were pro-choice, 88 percent of professors want more environmental protection “even if it raises prices or costs jobs” and “65 percent want the government to ensure full employment, a stance to the left of the Democratic Party.”
“The most left-leaning departments are English literature, philosophy, political science and religious studies, where at least 80 percent of the faculty say they are liberal and no more than 5 percent call themselves conservative.”
As Chris Mooney, a left-wing writer, wrote in the HuffingtonPost: “Higher education is a liberal and secular force in our society.”
If you are a parent who agrees with these postulates, you are likely to deem college worth $100,000 or more. You feel good knowing that the university is reinforcing your values and convictions in your child during the course of the four most impressionable years of his or her life.
On the other hand, if you are a parent who does not hold these positions, you are not merely wasting an enormous sum of money; you are paying an enormous sum of money to have a college inculcate views and values that are counter to your most precious values and ideals. What you can do about it will be the subject of a future column.
My bachelor’s may be in Useless Knowledge, but at least it’s knowledge. The degrees they’re handing out now are for conformity.
So I can expect your check when exactly? I mean, since you are offering to pay my monthly house payments now. (What? Where could you possibly get that from what was said?) (QED)
Something tells me that the lecturer ( I refuse to refer to such an individual as a “teacher” ) who says something like this only means “it’s only what everyone else says that should be broadly interpreted on a whim, and what I say comes from the etched stone tablets handed down from on High”.
Child? Most impressionable years of life?
Sorry, that’s just stupid.
Lee
I cannot tell you how many people have sent their kid (and since most are still paying the college bills that makes the student their dependent and, hence, still a kid fresh out of high school) who welcome home a stranger by winter break or following summer.
If they’re lucky, they may get the child they raised back in mid-to-late 20s.
Yes, the 18-22 range these days, when separated from family and 24/7 in the hot-house college environment is just about the most impressionable time in a young person’s life.
At least when you send your kid to a seminary, you know the mission is one of turning out a good Christian.
Most leftwing, public universities are not honest in telling parents they are Leftist seminaries with the mission of turning out Leftists.
Darleen, I’m not trying to be a wet blanket, but this has been the curriculum at most colleges for over thirty years. This kind of thinking is mainly in the liberal arts. There is no room for magical thinking in math (even if they do use imaginary numbers in calculus.)
Did Prager just stumble upon this information?
Again, sorry*, but a 15 y.o. is a young man or young woman, not a child, and I thought everyone knew the most impressionable years in a child’s life were 1-6.
*I may be quibbling, but I’m becoming peeved at the use of “child” to gain rhetorical advantage, whatever side uses it.
Yeah, my dad when to university at age 35 back in about 1974, and still says he received an indoctrination, not an education.
I think the main difference these days is parents are much less interested in the raising of their kids, i.e. more comfortable letting the school be solely responsible for teaching them everything they need to know. In fact, this link I posted yesterday is the perfect illustration…
leigh
No, he’s been saying this every year for years.
It’s worth repeating as the indoctrination has gotten even more intense … what with speech codes, etc.
I think it depends on the parents. Of course, that has always been the case.
Not to speak for anyone else, I have always been very strict with my children. I was allowed to run wild when I was a teen and made a lot of mistakes and felt the need to show my kids that I cared for and loved them very much. So much so that I wasn’t going to be their friend: I was and am their mother. Naturally, they didn’t like this chain of command much, but I explained to them that they will have many, many friends throughout their lives, but they only get one mother and father. My job was to prepare them to be productive members of society, good men, good husbands and good fathers in their turn.
Anyway, it’s important to stay on top of what they are learning at school. To discuss current events, to ask them their opinions and have them defend them in a logical manner and not rely on popular opinion or emotion. Picking your battles is important too. Kids aren’t idiots and they deserve to be heard.
There is a shift that happens in adolescence, which is still going on when kids graduate high school and go off to college. And again, they’re away from their parents longterm for the first time in their lives and trying to fit in to a new and unfamiliar environment.
They’re ripe for re-education by those hostile to their home values. One can quibble happily for hours about whether it’s “their most impressionable” time — but if it isn’t their most impressionable it’s certainly an impressionable period with much more critical longterm consequences. For them and for the society they’re being groomed to lead.
Lee
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t trust any random 15 year old to have the maturity to use a Kleenex to wipe the snot from their nose.
I know many who are mature (due to their parents being parents, not BFFs to them) but they aren’t the rule anymore.
Leigh
I was actually glad to see my stepson accept the academic scholarship he received for University of Portland rather than coming to California and getting involved in our UC System. He’s a rather brilliant kid, but hasn’t really been “out in the world” so-to-speak.
“it’s certainly an impressionable period with much more critical longterm consequences.”
See, that’s where I have a problem. It’s pretty much a cliché that if you aren’t a liberal when your 20 you have no heart, and if you aren’t a conservative when you’re 40 you have no brain.
Thinking on that, perhaps that’s the major difference these days. Emotionalism has largely replaced critical thinking…
Emotionalism has largely replaced critical thinking
Ding Ding Ding!
The hatey-hatiness being directed against Liz Cheney, even by her sister Mary, is case in point. People are sneering that Liz’s “the people should directly decide on same-sex marriage” is “pissing on her sister, Mary.” And Mary has upped the ante by saying Liz is “dead wrong” and that “all families are equal regardless of how they are formed”
Pure, unexamined emotionalism being celebrated in the media.
As late as the 1980s when I was an undergrad, even a state-owned commuter university like the one I went to, was still haunted by the odd (heh) liberal-arts prof who preferred thought over conformity.
I have little doubt such ducks are little tolerated today.
(Comment delayed by internet outage)
Liz is being Roved. They’re going to stop at nothing, not even pitting her sister against her.
Yeah, it seems education used to be about teaching critical thinking, now it’s about infusing the students with emotional appeals to political agendas.
A HS teacher called a local talk show recently and was talking about how geography isn’t even in the curriculum anymore, and literally half her students can’t tell her what continent they live on. I’ve personally run across two guys in their 20’s in the last year that didn’t know east from west, as in where the sun came up in the morning.
This ol’ world is in trouble…
copybook headings time
As far as Liz Cheney, my “a pox on both your houses” position re the Wyoming Senate seat race got tipped when I learned the Gang of RINOs is supporting Enzi.
Victor Hanson chats up the abiding problems with Milt Rosenburg, along the way noting the current issue effects (Iran, Syria, Egypt, etc.) of education of the sort derided in this post.
*your* child settles it for me. Even as I find myself at the age of eligibility for grandfatherhood, I am still my mother’s child. But 26 year old children need a boot in their ass.
It’s times like these when everyone can appreciate a bit of schadenfreude…
I’ll have large fries with that. Bitch.
“I have a honors BA and I’m defending my MA thesis in two weeks.
big edu and suckers born every minute
da tech guy
The Deception and (possible) Redemption of Andrea XX
I am at the end of my rope
entonces allí baile, insecto, baile!
outside the departments of business, math and the natural sciences
Right.
So where does Global Warming come from, again?
The idea that there’s no such thing as objective truth, or that “truth” is whatever serves the larger narrative has infected the sciences, too. There’s been a 75% increase in papers having to be retracted from scientific journals because of falsified data or even fabricated experiments.
The fact that they all have to compete for grant money for their livelihoods, and that only the studies that get results get the $$$, the temptation to exaggerate the results in the press releases (if not the actual study results) is more often succumbed to, because people have lost the ability to tell right from wrong or to care about it
ot i hate these clowns
NY’s Gillibrand Stumps for Colorado Senator Facing Recall
Wasserman Schultz: Colorado Recalls ‘Blatant Attack on Our Democratic Principles’
Thought you were going to be a 1 percenter, did you? Welcome to Obama’s America, sucker.
The thought of Wasserman Schultz recalls the attack of Mr. Creosote on his fellow diners.
“*your* child settles it for me. Even as I find myself at the age of eligibility for grandfatherhood, I am still my mother’s child”
Fine, then George Z DID shoot a child.
Bastard.
i hate these aholes more
DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz said national party backs recall
Which is to say, their bread is buttered on politics, not science.
Is there anything government can’t fuck up?
they all have to compete for grant money for their livelihoods
who funded/loaned their “education”? the commies suck.
Z was a child (in the same sense) himself, of someone.
This can be traced back to the beginnings of the progressive and socialist movements which targeted education. Changing what was taught and how it was taught as the key to transforming, this nation into one aligned with their ideals not those of its founding. Some of this was uncovered in a 1954 Congressional investigation. Scribd copy of the hearings is here, caution this is 2086 pages long and takes a long time loading, longer reading, and much longer to understand all the implications of what they uncovered.
I’ve only skimmed it myself.
Tracy and
SybrinaAlicia can say that. All Z-man needs to say is that he plugged a thug.It takes a village to raze a child.
Sorry for the horrible copy/paste? This was a comment by The Sanity Inspector about 1 1/2 years ago, thought it was relevant here….Warning, kind of long.
Congratulations, my child! You are finally going off to college. One day you were in diapers, and now you’re headed off into the wide world. In a sense, my work is done. For the first time you will be making your day-to-day decisions without input from me. You are not yet an adult, but neither are you an adolescent any longer. You will face the challenges that all young people face when they are on their own: self-discipline, work, finding your way in life. I trust you will use this time to prepare for adulthood, rather than to prolong your adolescence. These four years will seem like an eternity-before, during, and after them. It is your last and best opportunity to connect with large numbers of your peers, to get your share of sheer magic out of life. I wish you much success and fulfillment during your time there.
College is not like it was when I was there, however. Don’t misunderstand; I didn’t live in a golden age. I had some courses that were clinkers, some teachers that were stinkers, some friends who turned out to be sheer bastards, some times when I shamed myself. But that happens to everyone, and will also happen to you. What I am concerned about are the PC police. The curriculum-corers. The array of leftists who have seized control of so many universities, and who may prevent you from getting *my* money’s worth of education for you. Consider these tips I’ve written out for you, and though I hope you never need to use them, remember that forewarned is forearmed.
· I am sending you to college to become civilized. That is, I am sending you there to get steeped in the great record of The West, mankind’s most successful attempt to shake free of the degradation and chaos of bare savagery. People who want to destroy civilization are call “barbarians”. They are dangerous, none more so than barbarians with PhD’s. Don’t turn up your nose at a chance to learn something, but don’t confuse an open mind with a hole in your head, either.
· Political Correctness, like its foreign uncle Communism, is the negation of liberty masquerading as the attainment of liberation. Anything that must be done in lockstep may be good or bad, depending on circumstances-but it is never freedom.
· In any given state of affairs, five per cent of the people pull one way, five per cent pull another way, and the remaining 90 per cent are largely content to go along with whoever seems to be pulling the hardest. So don’t let the bastards shove you around! For everyone who takes your side, figure about three other people who sympathize, but aren’t quite brave enough to say so.
· Some professors will use standard English to deride standard English, Western ideas of human rights to denounce human rights in the West, scientific reasoning to deplore science, religious language to sneer at your religion. Such people may imagine themselves to be incisive critics, even voices of conscience. In truth, they are hothouse blossoms, as ignorant of their American blessings as fish are ignorant of water. The sincere ones, I mean. There are plenty others who have found it necessary to parrot this jargon simply in order to obtain employment. The lot of them should have no moral authority with you. Try not to snicker, though.
· There used to be a thing called American Philosophy. Your philosophy courses, if you take any beyond the introductory surveys, will consist mostly of the thought of French deconstructionists and their literal-minded American disciples. But you may have a chance to get introduced to people like William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Take the chance.
· You will most likely be required to swallow and regurgitate a considerable amount of feminist scholarship. The academic feminism you will likely encounter may be roughly broken down into four categories.
1) Mythological feminism. There never was a primordial female Eden. And women have never been all slaves. Man and woman both have the capacity for good and evil. The relations between the sexes, like the relations among any set of people, have been a mix of sordidness and saintliness throughout history. We have always been either at each others’ throats or in each others’ arms.
2) Hard-left feminism. Since at least the 1960s, when Marxism made its way back into American intellectual life, the destruction (“transformation”, in their parlance) of the family has been a goal of the feminists. Don’t ask me how or why, but it is evident that the religious inquisitor of the Middle Ages has been reborn as the militant political agitator in our own day. This is why, as a child, you saw episodes of Sesame Street and other “educational” programming minimizing the stature and benefits of a family headed by a husband and wife. Now you’re in for the grown-up version of the same destructive propaganda. To these people, every nest is a cage. Question all statistics. Chances are that they are incomplete, misconstrued or, like the famous Super Bowl wife-battering hoax, just plain lies.
3) Selective feminism. You will have to sit through a lot of blather about how frightened “the patriarchy” is of “strong women.” Most of the “strong women” trotted out will be leftists or proto-leftists. Margaret Thatcher, Eleanor of Aquitane, the Confederate home front, none of these strong women will be held up as examples of strength or endurance. Most had families and loved them, and did not produce agitprop for leftist causes, therefore in feminist eyes they never existed.
4) Self-pitying feminism. After hearing about all the “strong women”, you will be told what helpless victims women are today. Democracy and tradition are evil, they’ll say. Nothing good happens to women, unless a radicalized government bureaucracy and judiciary make it happen by edict, they’ll say. I have raised you to be a proud American. In the Third Rate World, where women really are treated as awfully as feminists pretend Americans are, feminism may be a force for good. “May”, I stress. But in America, feminism is a cultural luxury, made possible by the boundless freedom this country enjoys. Other people may wish to accept the manacles, to stop their hands from shaking. But you must remember the times I told you to wipe your nose and quit feeling sorry for yourself. You are nobody’s victim, nor has anyone ever been your victim.
· He who says he is without sin is a fool. So too he who says he is by definition incapable of racism is a godamighty fool. But he’s probably being well paid for saying so, if he is on the faculty.
· I have raised you to give people of other races and backgrounds the basic respect that any person is entitled to, in addition to the respect that they have to earn from you by their character. However, as in grade school, you will meet some of these people who have been raised to hate and resent you because of your race and background. Remember that you cannot change poisoned hearts. What will be new to you is that the university administration will think it right, good, and necessary to give these people special treatment, deference in all matters of controversy, and in general treat them like sacred cats in the temple. It’s a shameful sight, watching grownups in authority being turned into dancing bears whenever resentful brats snap their fingers. But that’s part of your education.
· You will encounter various forms of primitivism. Multiculturalists and diversity hounds, like children, are attracted to bright colors. So you will see utterly ordinary middle-class young people decked out in Mexican wedding shirts, llama hair ponchos, kente headcloths, Pert-conditioned dreadlocks, Birkenstocks, beads, bangles, badges, buttons, etc. The idea is that they wish to sweep away all the hypocrisies and encrustations of the modern world and get back to the simple essence of life in tune with nature. None of them really mean it, else they wouldn’t be at a university. For the students, it’s a phase; for the faculty, it’s a pose. None of them would care to forego First World standards of societal organization: liberty, tolerance–or dentistry, for that matter.
· There is more *genuine* diversity between Toscanini and Furtwangler, between Ingres and Delacroix, between Einstein and Bohr, between Shaw and Wilde, between Mencken and Chesterton, than among any given busload of multiculturalists. If any teacher in any class dismisses a person, movement, idea, or era as Dead White European Males, go immediately to the registrar and demand a refund, because you’ll know you are being cheated something scandalous.
· Beware of reality inversions. If you are asked to ponder a question like “What causes poverty?”, you may be sure that the questioner has a severely distorted view of history-or is shepherding you into an ideological corral. Poverty has been the norm for most people most of the time up until the last score of decades. “What causes wealth?” is a much more fruitful question, and it does not constrain you to wear any leftist hairshirts.
· Society’s enemies are radicals’ mascots. One college even has an endowed sociology chair named after a famous American traitor. Vagrants, criminals, semi-criminal entertainers, career government charity recipients, all will be held up for your sympathy, or to excite your anger against productive society. (When your teachers start blithering about “root causes” of social ills, listen carefully for any causes “rooted” in personal responsibility. There will most likely be none.) Other countries have suffered from real tyrannies, and have produced real prophets, martyrs, and freedom fighters. Your teacher, being irritated at thinking of his own insignificance compared to those brave souls, searches for an analogous role for himself. Since he lives in the freest nation in history, he alights upon his nation’s enemies, into whom he projects his fantasies of revolution.
· Learn to see through cant. “If you’re not part of the solution; you’re part of the problem” will be hurled at you from time to time. Invite the activist to consider that his solution may be part of the problem. Or someone may feel very brave and noble by saying, “Given the choice between betraying my country and betraying my friends, I would betray my country.” You can point out that by betraying one’s country one is also betraying one’s friends. Remember that talk may be expensive in college, but it carries even less culpability than in real life. Radicals prefer to be unaccountable for their words and deeds, which is why they cluster in universities and government bureaucracies.
· Finally, dig deep in the university library! Your classrooms may be a PC wasteland, but even the most deracinated radical has not yet dared to burn the libraries. The Western heritage is in there, if you take time
leigh says September 1, 2013 at 12:20 pm
Leigh, THIS. I was the same way as a kid, did the same for mine. One got it , the other well, she didn’t but she finally is now( in her almost mid 20s. ) I saw way too many parents that let their kids go to hell. I’d like to think I had some influence on them ( some still call me dad ) But never could reach them all.
But ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ held the gun.
I see that Prager has decided to switch his drink of choice. Apparently the Kool-Aid wasn’t strong enough so he decided to go with a cocktail of crack, heroin, crystal meth and Everclear smoothie.