College wasn’t always the cross between the bachelor party and study hall that it now resembles. As hard as this may be to believe, parents used to be OK with sending their kids to college because it wasn’t as disreputable a place as a crack house.
The modern university was created as a place for society to reproduce itself. Alumni and governments funded schools to ensure that each succeeding generation of adults would be just like the one it replaced.
The social revolution of the 20th century changed all that for good, and most people say “hallelujah.”
Who wants to live in a staid society? We’re much better off being open, free and questioning, and we have only the modern university to thank.
However, that line of reasoning is outdated.
While it maybe was true that college freed the minds of young people everywhere, that was only where the situation rested in the 1970s.
Since then, we’ve returned to the idea of lock-step indoctrination, and college is its boot camp.
A college student today might be blissfully unaware that the majority of the U.S. is seething in anger. After all, reasons the college student, this is the golden age of U.S. politics: a post-racial, post-partisan utopia where the only subject of disagreement is whether to interlace our fingers when we all hold hands to sing “Kumbaya.”
In reality, the president is perhaps the most partisan ever, and the backlash has been overwhelming.
From a high approval rating at his inauguration, he has spent nearly two years pursuing social policies opposed by most Americans while becoming shockingly complacent to nearly 10 percent unemployment.
An incredibly active political debate is taking place in our country, akin to that of the late 1960s. While college campuses were the focal points of that previous change, today they are largely unscathed by it.
The country revolts en masse against socialism while life on campus goes on as normal.
Students are politically liberal because their educators have taught them to be.
High school teachers largely and college professors especially are self-selected from among the most stridently-left partisans in our country, outnumbering conservative professors by a nearly 5-to-1 margin, according to The New York Times.
What’s more, because of their hyper-educated status, these people are less likely to think of their political leanings as “opinions,” instead viewing them as “truth.”
Throw in the lower education levels of their political opponents and it’s no longer two different views, it’s now the righteous crusade of enlightenment against ignorance.
It is this sense of self-satisfaction that prohibits them from questioning their beliefs when they meet others who disagree with them.
We’ve all had experiences where we are “sure” of something that turns out to be wrong.
Sometimes we give in easily and admit our mistake, while sometimes we double down in our insistence.
As illogical as it is, often what makes the difference is who is telling us. Two coworkers might offer identical criticism, but the one we perceive as a friend will have an easier time convincing us he’s right.
In high school I knew a boy named Robert that I would never, ever admit to be right about some item of disagreement, just because I hated him too much to think it might be true. It was not helpful, but that was how I felt.
The predominant liberal worldview, which holds that anyone without one of those Obama-O stickers on his car is a racist NASCAR-watching idiot, is not helpful.
College is not teaching this. Instead it teaches there is a true set of political opinions, and one’s enlightenment can be gauged by how closely his opinions match it.
Nowhere in the curriculum is this question taught: is there a rational explanation for my opponent’s behavior or opinion?
Instead of first resorting to charges of greed, racism, sexism and homophobia, college students should be trained to first ask if the other argument is logical.
The answer might surprise them, and it might go a long way towards helping them understand how the majority of the country supports ideas they are so certain are crazy.
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