America's Colleges As Indoctrination Mills

As you know, the autocrats in Beijing have been sending Muslims to re-education camps. It smells like something that Mao would have done, so naturally we are against it. The purpose seems to be to force the Muslim population to assimilate culturally. And to stop committing terrorist actions.

For reasons that escape me, the Chinese government believes that unassimilated Muslims pose a greater threat to national unity than does, for instance, white supremacy. One does not know how they came to such a conclusion… but they did. 

Anyway, we do not send anyone to re-education camps. We send young people, in the flower of their youth, to colleges and universities. As we can best ascertain these young people are then captured by the indoctrination mills that pass as institutions of higher learning. They are taught recycled Marxist claptrap and the virtues of overthrowing capitalism. Does that resemble what China's Uighurs might be learning in their reeducation camps?

America's college students are not taught how to think or to count or to read or to write. Then again, when they get to university they are so far behind in terms of basic intellectual skills, that teaching them anything seems hopeless. Credit for this state of affairs must go to their high schools and their parents.

Thus, they are allowed to believe that however stupid they are, they are really great. They are taught high self-esteem, in order not to feel badly about being ignorant. Keep in mind, the problem with having imbeciles like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Congress is that so many young people think that she is smart.

It makes you want to start studying Mandarin.

Anyway, three years ago Providence College professor Anthony Esolen explained what he was seeing in his students who take his classes in English literature. Since we missed his essay then, we are happy to revive it now, via Intellectual Takeout:

I now regularly meet students who have never heard the names of most English authors who lived before 1900. That includes Milton, Chaucer, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats. Poetry has been largely abandoned. Their knowledge of English grammar is spotty at best and often nonexistent. That is because grammar, as its own subject worthy of systematic study, has been abandoned. Those of my students who know some grammar took Latin in high school or were taught at home. The writing of most students is irreparable in the way that aphasia is. You cannot point to a sentence and say, simply, ‘Your verb here does not agree with your subject.’ That is not only because they do not understand the terms of the comment. It is also because many of their sentences will have no clear subject or verb to begin with. The students make grammatical errors for which there are no names. Their experience of the written language has been formed by junk fiction in school, text messages, blog posts, blather on the airwaves, and the bureaucratic sludge that they are taught for ‘formal’ writing, and that George Orwell identified and skewered seventy years ago. The best of them are bad writers of English; the others write no language known to man.

This is what you get when you declare war on Western Civilization. It's what happens when you decide that the English language was produced by a vast right wing conspiracy. It’s what you get when you make education into indoctrination in politically correct thinking. Rather than raise up the less literate, our culture has decided that the best way to assure that the imbeciles feel less stupid is to dumb down the curriculum and to stupidify everyone else.

One suspects the brightest college students no longer bother with Humanities courses anyway. They major in STEM subjects and leave the Humanities to others.

Being as Esolen wrote his essay three years ago, we cannot reasonably blame it on Donald Trump. But then, who can we blame it on? Tis a puzzlement.