Most of our leaders in the media and in government are products of a flawed educational system, one that has traded the harsh truths of reality for utopian fantasy. Liberal Arts education, as is promoted by most State colleges and even more intensely by elitist Ivy League schools, has traded free thinking for propaganda. The world of theory and wishful thinking has replaced a world of fact.
I listened today as when one recent graduate was asked how they would stop the beheadings. Their answer started with, “We need to get the Muslim community to come together and….”
That approach is not much different than that of Marie Harf at the State Department telling us we need to get the radicals jobs so that we can reach down and change the root causes of terrorism. Seriously, their religion, their ideology tells them to kill infidels. (That is everyone who does not believe as they do.) It’s not about jobs, its about their belief in how to get to heaven. (Saying that no true religion is violent is fantasy. 1500 years ago the Mayan’s played soccer with the heads of their enemies to appease their Gods.) Just because you don’t like how something is conducted does not make that thing something else. That is what I mean about liberal fantasy. They redefine things based on what they want not based on what is.
This liberal educational process has created generations of leaders ill prepared to handle the challenges we face. Below are several tenets of this education where propaganda and wishful thinking is taught and encouraged rather than facts. Each will be listed and explored in greater depth as we progress.
1.) The necessity for a strong military to protect our freedom and our lives is denigrated.
2.) That the free market promotes inequity and poverty while socialism and communism produce more prosperous societies.
3.) Evolution is taught as the only way humanity could have developed. Believing in a creator is actively discouraged.
4.) Unrestrained sexual freedom and unlimited abortion are promoted as the hallmarks of modern enlightenment.
5.) Those with different beliefs are penalized with poorer grades, made fun of and ostracized by their professors.
6.) Courses are taught from non historical perspectives to reframe history to support current social agenda’s.
Please hang with me as we explore these points. This approach to education has had a tremendous impact on the way our current leadership approaches managing government and the affairs that affect our lives.
Let’s start with the military. Throughout a number of courses at liberal arts colleges the student is introduced to the concept of the military industrial complex. All that industry, invention, and scientific development is treated as a drain on society. If only those resources could go for food or social work then we would be so much better off. Students are told that the evil corporations are taking from us and from the poor in order to create better and better weapons. They are told that these weapons and the military itself are not needed.
The fact that the military protected us in WWII, freed Kuwait from Sadaam, and has kept the now resurgent Soviet Union out of the main part of Europe is not mentioned. It is the ability to defend land and territory that protects us. There will always be those in the world that want to take from others or cause harm to others. Without a strong military those people will do just that. There has never been a case where one side lays down their arms and their enemies do not attack. It is the way of human nature. It is what makes unilateral disarmament a formula for disaster. Still many students are taught that this is a good thing. We see the result of our unilateral reduction in arms. The level of chaos in the world has increased 100 fold. Here reality clearly shows the academic theory to be nothing more than fantasy and wishful thinking.
As to economics. The facts again outweigh the theory. Societies with greater economic freedom and lower tax rates have a far greater average standard of living than those with significant socialist and communist elements. Sure there is a disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest, but if the poorest are doing better than 90% of those in the rest of the world, then those poor are doing pretty well. In the United States, the poor by and large all eat well and have TVs, cell phones, and cars. Compare this to the poor in South America or Africa where they lack roads, running water and electricity in many places. Capitalism built the world that has this high level of prosperity. Over the past 6 years that prosperity has started to diminish in direct relation to the amount of social reform put into place. A greater number of American are living pay check to pay check because of the socialist policies.
Here in economics, the facts belie the theory. Students are not taught the truth, but what professors wish to be true. As they grow up and become leaders they fail to understand how to create wealth and prosperity. These same students are unprepared for both the marketplace and for leadership.
A student who says openly that they believe that God created human kind is treated as a leper by his or her professors. Evolution, which to this day has failed to show one thing actually turning into another is taught as gospel. Nevertheless, neither evolution nor the big bang answers the question as to why we exist at all. Here again, reality, the fact that there is existence is ignored in the pursuit of liberal arts truth.
Perhaps one of the most insidious pairs of thought have to do with sexual freedom. Students are encouraged not to bond but to have ‘free sex’. The idea of marriage is discouraged. Nevertheless, countless psychological studies have shown that such an approach diminishes self esteem and self worth. When pregnancies occur these same students are told that the fetus is only a mass of tissue. The result is countless of individuals that fear they have murdered their children and know in their hearts this is the case. The value of life is diminished and the harm done, all in the name of enlightenment and pleasure. Had these same promoters examined the studies of psychological health and the benefit of family, they would teach these students differently.
Again, what is taught and promoted has nothing to do with ‘good’ as has been proven by time and studies, only with desire. It is the world these teachers desire, not the world that is best.
The power of the grade and its future impact on students is used to promote the views above to the exclusion of fact and thought. Students that write a positive piece of communism are rewarded with higher grades. Those that promote capitalism or who suggest that the protestant church was a force for good are ostracized and given D’s and F’s. Instead of rewarding scholarship these schools are rewarding ideology. A belief in capitalism promoted by a scholarly work is excoriated while support of Keynesian economics is lauded as brilliant, even without facts to back it up. Instead of being a bastion of free thought and speech, Universities have become the re-education centers of modern America.
Tenure was provided to professors so they could speak their minds without being fired. Now those same professors use that system to prevent free thought and ideas. They forbid those who have different ideas from getting tenure and encourage students to be intolerant of others views. That is why politically correct speech has become the norm. The crime is offending, even if it is truth that is spoken. It is as if 1980 China lives well on campus. There is not even enough juice for a Tiananmen square type protest.
This is by no means a new phenomenon, but is one that has progressed for the last 50 years. In the 1970’s I had a medieval history course which among other things examined the role of Christianity in the development of Western society. As the discussion covered the Council of Nicaea and a number of other venues where much of early Christianity worked itself out with the politics of the time. The professor would make point after point to say how history invalidated Christian beliefs. Much of that information was not even within the scope of the class. Looking back, it is clear that the information he presented was to a large extent contrived to discourage Christian beliefs.
The real harm that our institutions of modern liberal arts are causing are from the contrived and often one sided interpretation of curricula. Instead of being a world filled with the exploration of knowledge our universities have become re-education centers aimed at producing only one type of thought. As our society declines, government gets bigger, and poverty increases, we can lay that blame squarely on the academic institutions that have traded teaching theory and fantasy for teaching fact. Until that changes the United States will continue to be a nation in decline.
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