Don’t Tell Your Parents
Dennis Prager on attempts to hide classroom indoctrination:
The vast majority of our colleges have become left-wing seminaries. Just as Christian seminaries exist to produce committed Christians, Western universities exist to produce committed leftists… Universities differ in only one respect: Christian seminaries admit their goal, whereas the universities deceive the public about theirs. Thus, in the “social sciences” — disciplines outside the natural sciences and math — a large number of college teachers inject their politics into their classrooms. And if they are recorded, the general public will become aware of just how politicised their classroom lectures are.
But there is another reason. Most professors objecting to being recorded know on some level that they are persuasive only when their audience is composed largely of very young people just out of high school. They know that if their ideas are exposed to adults, they may be revealed as intellectual lightweights. Students therefore need to understand that when professors object to being recorded, it is a statement of contempt for them. The professors are, in effect, saying to their students: “Listen. I can get away with this intellectually shallow, emotion-based propaganda when you are the only people who actually hear it. You aren’t wise enough to perceive it as such. But if people over 21 years of age hear it, I’m toast.”
See, for instance, this first day of a creative writing class, and the examples that follow it, in which attempts to circumvent normal proprieties are passionately endorsed by leftist educators. The subject of some educators’ disdain for students – say, by conspiring to rob them of a chance to hear an alternative view – was touched on here. And for an illustration of just how vigorous and successful those efforts to indoctrinate can be, see also this.
Update:
And here’s a footnote to the Caleb O’Neil case mentioned in Prager’s article.
Ba-dum tisshhh.
If the BoE link was behind your allusion to 1694 I’ll retract the part of my following remark addressing it, Tom.
1913 alone is notable for its progressivism, my point being that the political right, such as it is, first fails and then denies its part in eventually preserving it. As dicentra rightly points out to criticism, at best Wilson was the progressive who got the ball really rolling. For my part, I didn’t raise the Fed but it certainly is another central element from that era. These and more are the cornerstones progressivism laid, then and since, that were eventually defended by the right.
Ask a conservative if his involuntary weekly contribution is his constitutional birthright once he retires, by gawd. Or if his veteran’s patriotism should ever come to question what Eisenhower warned against a half-century ago, you commies. Or if you have anything to fear if you’ve done nothing wrong.
I appreciate your elaboration. It should be a reference work bolted to every self-identified conservative’s desk (forwarded by a Rockefeller in no uncertain terms. Maybe such an announcement will cut through the dense undergrowth of a hundred years of rightist revisionism and inverted principle.)
In the US the standard right tacitly intellectually adopts and pragmatically all but owns many such things. It converts them to rock-ribbed Republicanism.
Back somewhat on topic: the public institution hasn’t been a target for defunding by rightists since its inception. With majorities as far as the eye can see, that won’t change in 2017 because no sizeable list of representatives have been thusly informed by their constituents. You could make the case that given this blog’s catalog of dysfunction, its established institution has been given life by conservatives.
Given mankind’s expertise in madness, you’d think somebody could get a bill written, somebody could sponsor it, a rational constituency could responsibly see to its passing, and the thing would be signed.
After all, there’s a fairly hefty prohibition against religions of State.
Farnsworth: Isn’t ‘decolonization’ just ‘taking a dump’?
‘Ba-dum tisshhh’ could be the sound that it makes (if using modern plumbing).
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A glimmer of hope from the world of American academia?
The former Provost of Stanford, John Etchemendy, gave a talk entitled: “The Threat from Within”.
The threat from outside is apparent. Potential cuts in federal funding would diminish our research enterprise and our ability to fund graduate education.
So far, so bland, but…
But I’m actually more worried about the threat from within. Over the years, I have watched a growing intolerance at universities in this country – not intolerance along racial or ethnic or gender lines – there, we have made laudable progress. Rather, a kind of intellectual intolerance, a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for.
Read it all here.
Farnsworth M Muldoon: “Unless one has had it removed, all recipes eventually go through the colon”.
I denounce you for being offensive to people with colostomies.
Your use of “Unless” constitutes a rectumnormative hate crime.
rectumnormative
I’m writing that one down.
Or they just got caught *this time*.
Try being that student 30 years ago. Try being that student 30 years ago without the video evidence. Try, back then, objecting to having to sit through such indoctrination unrelated to the subject of the class. Try bringing that up, 30 years ago, to what conservatives who might be in positions of responsibility, for them to address it. Crickets is what you’d get. Even today, only with significant outside help, did this student not get thrown out of school. And the professor has yet to suffer any consequences. And then let’s put this same sort of conflict in the context of psychology/psychiatry. Why anyone today is surprised at where we are today surprises me….ok, not really…
I denounce you…
I shall report to Sector 9 for re-grooving. Being a callous churl I also committed a microaggression against the transcolonic.
Personally I’m surprised that most students don’t record all their lectures, for use as a revision aid or to help complete notes after the event or to pass on to classmates who didn’t make it to the lecture…
When a childhood friend of mine was a student at Stevens in Hoboken, it was apparently very common for a lot of his classmates to skip most days, just sending a tape recorder in their place.
But then, Stevens is a STEM school.
I don’t believe that anyone at that time (the 1920’s) could have seen the consequences of things occuring in the 21th century at that time
Nothing to do with unintended consequences and everything to do with the stated desires of Wilson and his successors — to replace “outdated”, “outmoded” institutions such as representative government and constitutions with “scientific” methods of governance, wherein a cadre of experts direct the affairs of the nation entire. Because evolutions.
Given that conservatives — or should I say “classical liberals” — want to conserve Enlightenment principles and the Constitution that embodies them, identifying the progressive’s explicit desire to do away with classical liberalism does NOT qualify as smug Monday-morning quarterbacking in the least.
The fact that high school history books omitted this significant sea change does not constitute self-congratulation on my part.
Speaking of recording lectures, I’m reminded of the iconic scene in _Real Genius_ (used here: http://www.screencast.com/t/eWQo2oQ3AXd by someone making some kind of point).
Foreshadows today’s distance education/MOOC revolution.
Rachel Dolezal, former NAACP leader who claimed to be black, is on food stamps.
Oh, right, and following that, Nkechi Amare Diallo . . .