The Future Left the Group: Education, Culture, and Values
Education is the wealth of a generation. If you want quality education for tomorrow, you’ll have to accept upsetting today’s students. That’s what long-term thinking entails. The etymology of “college,” from the Latin collegium, refers to an “association” of people with a common purpose.
Before reaching English, the term jumped from Latin to Old French as collège, where it was used to designate communities of scholars. But today’s education isn’t focused on scholarship, it’s centered on egalitarianism. It’s not concerned with posing fertile, open questions to students but with indoctrinating them with closed answers. (RELATED: Higher Education’s 7 Deadly Sins)
Curricula are packed with ideological content that has nothing to do with science, the arts, or — least of all— training for a trade, unless that trade is becoming a politician or a union activist. The medieval university resembles today’s Western universities about as much as a book by Judith Butler resembles one by Thomas Aquinas. And students hear far more about Butler than Aquinas. It’s pretty simple: if you make them study an idiot, you turn them into idiots. If you make them study a genius, you turn them into geniuses. (RELATED: Make America Literate Again)
Politicians don’t know how to educate. They distrust freedom in education because they feel safer churning out sheep-like graduates. All they should be doing regarding education is to ensure equal opportunities, dismantle bureaucracy, and eliminate the clusters of parasites acting as ideological agents they’ve sown throughout educational institutions. (RELATED: American Universities Welcome Foreign Radicals Who Sue Us)
Parents are the ones who know how to educate. And those with the greatest incentive to promote educational excellence are private schools — foster competition between them, and you’ll raise standards. And, of course, expand the school choice system — make it as easy as possible for parents to pick the best educational options for their kids. Better yet, promote homeschooling too.
Teachers are supposed to be a nation’s latent treasure. But you need excellence in the teaching profession. You might think unions have made them untouchable, but the truth is most aren’t happy with the academic decline, not to mention they’re the first to suffer from the loss of values in students.
A conservative plan for the future should allocate resources to train the best teachers and send the mediocre ones to sweep up the rubble of the Department of Education, right after Trump manages to drop a bomb on it. A true national consensus on long-term education should start with two ideas: meritocracy and excellence. And, if you want, efficiency. But for efficiency, the first thing you need to do is send the Department of Education to hell. (RELATED: K-12 Education is Failing: Abolish the DOE)
Ideology isn’t education. Ideology is a hindrance to students’ development. I know the left isn’t willing to admit it, but ideology should be a consequence of the best education, not the other way around. That’s the difference between creating excellent students and cloned sheep.
The cultural revolution must also begin in the classroom. Values aren’t a sticker you can slap onto kids’ heads as they turn from 12 to 13. Values are the result of cultural heritage, history, philosophy, morality, and constitutions. Only by dedicating generous efforts to explaining the origins of Western civilization —from Greece and Rome to Christianity — can you make your words about values resonate in young hearts.
Stop teaching damn fist-in-the-air feminism! God created all men equal long before the first purple-haired, hairy-armpitted lunatic called for a women’s march.
On the other hand, today’s job market can’t keep relying on educational models that were useful in yesterday’s world. Those designing curricula should ask themselves more often: What the hell am I doing this for? The goal is to train tomorrow’s best professionals. What makes a country prosper more, a doctor of gender studies or an engineer? There’s an endless pile of academic deadwood that does nothing for students except produce future bureaucrats.
Anyone who doesn’t regularly read me might think this academic pragmatism implies the destruction of the humanities. Not at all. There shouldn’t be fewer humanities but more. The deeper we dive into the AI era, the more essential it becomes to root knowledge in solid foundations, develop multidisciplinary skills, and train culturally superior students. The humanities may not directly provide solid career paths, but their presence in all educational plans should grow, because with them, any curriculum gains depth and value. (RELATED: Love and Reason in the Ruins)
Lastly, I can’t talk about education and culture without addressing the great cultural sprinkler of our time: social media, content creators, Hollywood, and platforms like Netflix. TikTok, in China’s hands, is “educating” American kids. I have nothing more to add.
Trump said something about wanting to make Hollywood great again. Something that could once more be a beacon of Western culture for the world, not the dogmatic woke cesspool it is now. And Netflix? It should just collapse under its own weight. Here’s hoping the free market works its magic, like it did with woke Disney.
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