The American education system focuses more on politically correct crusades than intellectually correct arguments. A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears.
She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide — a fancy chemical name for water. A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times.
This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov’s dog when we hear a certain sound — in this case, the sound of some politically correct crusade.
People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.
Educational institutions created to pass on to the next generation the knowledge, experience, and culture of the generations that went before them have instead been turned into indoctrination centers to promote whatever notions, fashions, or ideologies happen to be in vogue among today’s intelligentsia.
Many conservatives have protested against the specific things with which students are being indoctrinated. But that is not where the most lasting harm is done. Many, if not most, of the leading conservatives of our times were on the left in their youth. These have included Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and the whole neoconservative movement.
The experiences of life can help people outgrow whatever they were indoctrinated with. What may persist, however, is the lazy habit of hearing one side of an issue and being galvanized into action without hearing the other side — and, more fundamentally, not having developed any mental skills that would enable you to systematically test one set of beliefs against another.
It was once the proud declaration of many educators that “We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think.” But far too many of our teachers and professors today are teaching their students what to think — about everything from global warming to the new trinity of “race, class, and gender.”
Even if all the conclusions with which they indoctrinate their students were 100 percent correct, that would still not be equipping students with the mental skills to weigh opposing views for themselves, in order to be prepared for new and unforeseeable issues that will arise over their lifetimes, after they leave the schools and colleges.
Many of today’s “educators” not only supply students with conclusions, but promote the idea that students should spring into action because of these prepackaged conclusions — in other words, vent their feelings and go galloping off on crusades, with neither a knowledge of what is said by those on the other side nor the intellectual discipline to know how to analyze opposing arguments....
Will Rogers once said that it was not ignorance that was so bad but “all the things we know that ain’t so.” But our classroom indoctrinators are getting students to think that they know after hearing only one side of an issue. It is artificial stupidity.
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Dr. Thomas Sowell is a syndicated columnist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. This column was originally published at National Review Online on March 10, 2010.
The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother—who was never very good at school—makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)
Unable even to consider that something might be wrong with higher education, mom and dad begin to think there is something wrong with their daughter, and she begins to internalize that feeling.
Everyone has told her that "there are always places for good people in academe." She begins to obsess about the possibility of some kind of fatal personal shortcoming. She goes through multiple mock interviews, and takes business classes, learning to present herself for nonacademic positions. But again and again, she is passed over in favor of undergraduates who are no different from people she has taught for years. Maybe, she wonders, there's something about me that makes me unfit for any kind of job.
This goes on for years: sleepless nights, anxiety, escalating and increasingly paralyzing self-doubt, and a host of stress-induced ailments. She has even removed the Ph.D. from her résumé, with some pain, but she lives in dread that interviewers will ask what she has been doing for the last 12 years. (All her old friends are well established by now, some with families, some with what seem to be high-powered careers. She lives in a tiny apartment and struggles to pay off her student loans.) What's left now but entry-level clerical work with her immediate supervisor just three years out of high school?
She was the best student her adviser had ever seen (or so he said); it seemed like a dream when she was admitted to a distinguished doctoral program; she worked so hard for so long; she won almost every prize; she published several essays; she became fully identified with the academic life; even distancing herself from her less educated family. For all of those reasons, she continues as an adjunct who qualifies for food stamps, increasingly isolating herself to avoid feelings of being judged. Her students have no idea that she is a prisoner of the graduate-school poverty trap. The consolations of teaching are fewer than she ever imagined.
Such people sometimes write to me about their thoughts of suicide, and I think nothing separates me from them but luck.
Scenarios like that are what irritate me about professors who still bleat on about "the life of mind." They absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens to graduate students by saying, distantly, "there are no guarantees." But that phrase suggests there's only a chance you won't get a tenure-track job, not an overwhelming improbability that you will.
Some professors tell students to go to graduate school "only if you can't imagine doing anything else." But they usually are saying that to students who have been inside an educational institution for their entire lives. They simply do not know what else is out there.
A college diploma is supposed to be the ticket to the good life. Colleges and politicians tell students, “Your life will be much better if you go to college. On average during your lifetime you will earn a million dollars more if you get a bachelor’s degree.” Barack Obama, stumping on the campaign trail, said, “We expect all our children not only to graduate high school, but to graduate college.”
Rachele Percel heard the promises. She borrowed big to pay about $24,000 a year to attend Rivier College in New Hampshire. She got a degree in human development. “I was told just to take out the loans and get the degree because when you graduate you’re going to be able to get that good job and pay them off no problem,” she told me for last week’s “20/20.”
But for three years she failed to find a decent job. Now she holds a low-level desk job doing work she says she could have done straight out of high school. And she’s still $85,000 in debt. This month she had to move out of her apartment because she couldn’t pay the rent.
The promise about college? “I definitely feel like it was a scam,” says Rachele. Her college wrote us that that many of its graduates have launched successful careers. But Rachele’s problem isn’t uncommon. A recent survey asked thousands of students: Would you go to your college again? About 40 percent said no.
“The bachelor’s degree? It’s America’s most overrated product,” says education consultant and career counselor Dr. Marty Nemko.
Nemko is one of many who are critical of that often-cited million-dollar bonus. “There could be no more misleading statistic,” he says. It includes billionaire super-earners who skew the average. More importantly, the statistic misleads because many successful college kids would have been successful whether they went to college or not.
“You could take the pool of college-bound students and lock them in a closet for four years — and they’re going to earn more money,” Nemko says. Those are the kids who already tend to be more intelligent, harder-working and more persistent. But universities still throw around that million-dollar number. Arizona State recently used it to justify a tuition hike.
Charles Murray’s recent book, Real Education, argues that many students just aren’t able to handle college work. Graduation statistics seem to bear him out. “If you’re in the bottom 40 percent of your high school class,” Nemko says, “you have a very small chance of graduating, even if you are given eight and a half years.”
Colleges still actively recruit those kids, and eight years later, many of those students find themselves with no degree and lots of debt. They think of themselves as failures. “And the immoral thing about it is that the colleges do not disclose that!”
For many kids, career counselors told us, it’s often smarter to acquire specific marketable skills at a community college or technical school, or to work as an apprentice for some business. That makes you more employable. Vocational education pays off for many. Electricians today make on average $48,000 a year. Plumbers make $47,000. That’s more than the average American earns. But some people look down on vocational school. A degree from a four-year college is considered first class. A vocational-school degree is not.
“More people need to realize that you don’t have to get a four-year degree to be successful,” says Steven Eilers, who went through an automotive program and then continued his education by getting a paying job as an apprentice in a car-repair center. He’s making good money, and he has zero student-loan debt.
Eilers' story is no fluke. In the past year, while hundreds of thousands of white-collar jobs vanished, the auto-repair industry added jobs. Self-serving college presidents and politicians should drop the scam. Higher enrollments and government loan programs may be good for them, but they are making lots of our kids miserable and poor. For many, the good life can be lived without college.
Once confined to dorm-room gossip sessions, salacious details about the hook-up culture on today's college campuses have become fodder for serious sociological analysis.
No fewer than four books on the topic have been published this year alone. Among them are sociologist Kathleen Bogle's unflinching investigation of campus sexual norms in Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laura Sessions Stepp's alarming analysis of promiscuity's emotional costs in Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both.
In another -- Sex and the Soul -- Boston University religion professor Donna Freitas probes the disturbing disconnect between students' religious convictions and sexual choices. And in Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex is Affecting Our Children, obstetrician/gynecologists Joe McIlhaney and Freda McKissic Bush survey the scientific evidence for psychological scars linked to supposedly strings-free sex.
These authors often differ in their analyses of the hook-up culture's root causes and costs. Yet the proliferation of similar studies in recent years suggests an emerging consensus among experts that today's anything-goes campus sexual mores carry lasting consequences we only have begun to understand. And those consequences extend well beyond unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
While campus safe-sex advocates carefully instruct college students in the art of applying condoms and quizzing prospective partners about their sexual histories, most avoid grappling with the emotional, spiritual and moral consequences of casual sex. University-sponsored "Sex Week" festivities -- a new staple on many campuses that typically blends provocative lectures from pornographers and "sexperts" with condom giveaways -- rarely feature discussions of how hooking up in college may hinder the search for lasting love after graduation.
The transitory, transactional and often anonymous sexual encounters that have replaced dating on most campuses give young adults the illusion of intimacy without the hassle of relationships. But those flings may exact a high toll when today's swinging singles try to become tomorrow's committed spouses.
A new study suggests that the hook-up generation already is showing signs of marital strain. David Atkins, a research associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington, recently analyzed 15 years of data from the General Social Survey and found a rise in reported infidelity among young couples. In 1991, about 15 percent of men and 12 percent of women younger than 35 said they had been unfaithful in their marriages. In 2006, 20 percent of men and 15 percent of women said they had.
There are many possible explanations for that shift, but the habits of heart cultivated by today's hook-up culture qualify as a leading culprit. It's hard to imagine better preparation for adultery than years of emotionally detached, random sexual couplings. And the "marriage-lite" solution embraced by growing numbers of cohabiting young couples -- many of whom are refugees from the hook-up culture and too skittish for marriage -- may exacerbate the problem, as the temporary mindset they learn in their live-in romances transfers to their marriages.
Such long-term consequences rarely occur to a college student fixated on final exams and Friday night plans. But some students are making the connection between sexual behavior now and prospects for a successful marriage later.
On such campuses as Princeton and Harvard, students are rebelling against the culture of promiscuity by launching social clubs that promote chastity and sexual self-restraint as the keys to finding faithful, lifelong love. Cassandra DeBenedetto, a founder of Princeton's pro-chastity Anscombe Society, recently launched the Love and Fidelity Network to help students at other universities foment their own grassroots rebellions.
Theirs is a decidedly countercultural movement. It also is urgently needed, not only for the physical health of students today but for the health of their marriages and families decades down the road.
