Teaching in the Twenty-First Century
By R.R. Reno

I don't understand how he can make this claim:

Colleges and universities may fail in many ways, but in the main all the testing and applying does a good job sorting students by aptitude, achievement, and inherited cultural values. The end result: a pretty clear picture of winners and losers in twenty-first century American society—which is why the kids keep coming, and parents keep paying.

Aptitude and achievement? The ability to do certain tasks for corporate America, and be officially recognized for this? That's all the degree does, to lend support to this claim. How many people with the right skills, acquired through other means, but without the necessary degree or credential, can get hired? I would think not so many.

Colleges may be able to certify who has passed the basic level of literacy needed to work in corporate America. Not much else.

Slowly, however, I have come to realize that we tend to teach as much in response to our fears as our hopes. There are, perhaps, two main and very different intellectual fears. The first is a fear of opportunities squandered, of truths unnecessarily missed. The second is a fear of deception, of falsehoods wrongly cherished.

It is crushingly obvious that the present dictatorship of relativism is profoundly motivated by the second fear.

I don't see the acquiescence to the subversion of tradition and the lack of humility and faith among students as being motivated by fear. I think it is motivated by something else. Some may be motivated by a erroneous zeal for justice, but there is something behind the error, a moral flaw and not an intellectual one.