Education as Indoctrination

Paul Gottfried, PCU

Although one finds some real students in the sciences and occasionally even in the humanities, much of what goes on in college courses, and especially in education, social work and communications, rarely rises above the ridiculous. College learning has become devoid of ideational substance or real study requirements.

But who should be authorized, I hear from college administrators, to say whether a student has acquired enough learning to receive a college degree? Apparently it should depend on what the provider and customers think the product means. It’s like intelligence, which we are told exists in multiple forms, all deserving equal respect? And unless a graduate hopes to go on to medical school, a prestigious law school, or some other professional school requiring in-depth learning, no one will care what that former student has learned, providing he/she comes with a degree. There are accreditation boards, but from my experience, it would seem that those doing the visitations have exceedingly limited understanding of a proper learning environment. PC indoctrination and minority recruitment are the major concerns of the Middle Atlantic Board that pays visits to my college.

It might be countered that colleges are providing a service for which lots of people pay and therefore it would be niggling to complain about a commodity others value. Unfortunately this argument doesn’t work. We are talking not about the sale of Snicker bars or baseball cards but about something more significant. We are describing the degeneration of what used to be higher learning into an ominous development with long-range implications. The more higher learning becomes associated with what is infantile as well as dishonest, the more deeply it affects our understanding of higher education, the sciences and the process of becoming an educated person.

College education is being turned into a prolonged yap session for college enrollees -- together with an expensive “college experience” that usually entails minimal study time. We have predigested material that the professor is supposed to provide, along with fun and games. Such inventiveness is necessary to make sure the coordinator of the “learning group” gets rave evaluations. Without such evaluations instructors upset their employers, who are looking for tuition-bearing bodies. A common complaint on the right is that education is becoming an exercise in memorizing cultural Marxist views. But I would add that students pick up this gibberish as a form of ersatz learning. It is easier to learn which groups White Christian males oppressed the worst than to study calculus or Latin. Most of the students I encounter can do A without much effort, but plainly not B.

Although PC is taught at elite universities, its function there is entirely different from what it is elsewhere. In the Ivies, for example, PC constitutes the ideological basis of the present managerial order. It is the sacral and legitimating teaching of the ruling class that has to be passed on to a new generation of priests, in order to maintain the system. PC and diversity as transmitted at the top are not at all what they are at the bottom. At less than distinguished colleges, they are the candy of the intellectually challenged or hopelessly mediocre, which is pushed for among other reasons to keep government agencies and leftist accreditation boards off the backs of college administrators.

See also The Academic Bubble  by Scott Locklin. Dreaming of a Culture War by Paul E. Gottfried.