Campuses were once places where ideas were debated. Today, they are places where any right-of-center opposition speech is labeled “hate” and is shut down. Liberal schools like Emory, Middlebury and Brown fight to keep right-of-center voices off campus. They do not educate, they indoctrinate. And our country is paying the price.
College kids are so Bernie Sanders-liberal today — 41% of them don’t believe in free speech and the other 59% believe the federal government should pay for it.
If you notice, most of the nonsense is at small liberal arts schools (personally, I never trust a college that does not have a football team). They have all bought into government control of our lives. If the government says so, we must all continue to wear masks for as long as very unhealthy and old people continue to die.
A friend’s daughter has a $75,000 a year liberal arts degree from Emory, which means she is a receptionist at her dad’s friend’s law firm in New York. She is super liberal and buys into the notion that the world will not be right until Washington and Lee University is named just “and.”
Teachers unions have taken their insanity to the next level by pushing critical race theory (CRT) in all classes. CRT is so damaging, it escaped from a liberal arts college’s Humanities lab somewhere in the Northeast. Too bad CRT was not invented in Vegas, so it would “stay in Vegas.”
If our Founders were around today (after visiting the Times Square theater district to catch the musical “Hamilton”), they would be appalled by what has happened to education in America. The founding of this country, something we all should celebrate, is now being taught in CRT as something evil.
Colleges, which I have long said have priced themselves out as a value proposition for many, are the front lines of the war on free speech and common sense. Parents, students and employers must continue to ask themselves if taking on so much student loan debt for such lame “educations” is smart.
One third of college students spend fewer than five hours a week studying. That gives students and faculty time to go to the campus quad and play Hacky Sack (with helmets and COVID-preventing masks for safety). You can fully expect campuses to require kids to continue to wear masks post-COVID, just to see if they can make them do it. They can just tell students that masks will protect them from racial injustice, white supremacy and climate change.
Sadly, the middle-class is hurt most by prohibitive costs. College costs have risen at twice the rate of inflation. My heart sinks when I hear lower-to-middle class parents tell me their son or daughter is going to an expensive college to study art history, sports marketing or English Lit. I want to tell them to just save their money and do not take on student loan debt, debt the government will readily strap them with, for such a degree. Read “Beowulf” on your own; it is free. And let CNN point out all the “micro-aggressions” to you; do not pay a college $45k a year to do that.
More kids should consider the military, trade school or community colleges. Learn a trade or a business! And understand math. In todays’ world today, the richest 15% own 90% of the wealth, and the dumbest 15% have 90% of the Gender Studies degrees. If your Gender Studies degree is more than five years old it is worthless anyway. Back then there were only two genders to study.
We have an unsustainable $25 trillion in national debt and we spend our time fretting over PC silliness. And you wonder why China is kicking our tails economically? In 2019 U.S. colleges issued more Visual and Performing Arts degrees than in computer science and math.
The only thing CRT will help our kids with is perhaps math; since it teaches that they can take money from others, it might make them better at division.
We have dumbed down our education system. As we know, subjects like math and English are racist. To keep quantifiably smarter kids out of school, many California state colleges no longer make them take the ACT or SAT. Instead, they proffer an essay question to gain admission: If you divide white privilege by all the white supremacists at the Capitol Building on January 6, then multiply by structural racism, how much climate change does that cause?
Ron Hart is a syndicated op-ed humorist, award-winning author, and TV/radio commentator; you can reach him at Ron@RonaldHart.com or Twitter @RonaldHart