Especially Catholic colleges and universities!
Forget for the moment the greater purpose of giving students a liberal education and a stronger foundation in the Western intellectual tradition; there is the goal of developing literacy. At the Center for Literate Values, there is a collection of essays originally published in Praesidium on literacy in higher education: Ivory Rubble: Essays on the Collapse of Literacy in Higher Education (With Modest Proposals for Partial Salvage). See the essays written by Thomas Bertonneau. (h/t to a reader of The Thinking Housewife)
Some reactions to what I've read so far (which includes the essay "The Vanishing Cultivated Girl and Her Replacement" by Thomas Bertonneau):
In many elementary schools in the Silicon Valley, students in the upper grades are encouraged or required to use computers to do research, type reports. There is a naive belief that students must become familiar with using computers to write and do research. Might it not be the case that introducing computers to the young will reinforce bad habits of thinking and writing? Instead of checking on the reliability of one's sources, one is conditioned to rely even more on an electronic mediation of the real world. Many of these students cannot even write properly -- shouldn't greater emphasis be placed on their learning how to write, rather than using a gadget whose days are limited?
Even if our institutions of higher education are not responsible for the lack of literacy in freshmen (this is to be blamed on our public institutions of primary and secondary education), they (along with the National Government) are responsible for the higher education bubble and for promoting their own well-being above that of the students. (Apparently, just last week an article was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education about underemployment affecting those with Bachelor's and graduate degrees.)
More importantly, colleges and universities are complicit in the destruction of culture and souls. But I am thinking at the moment of their failure to morally form students. Their rhetoric about intellectual formation and moral formation is contradicted by their inaction and negligence. Administration has more interest in filling seats, gaining prestige, and keeping themselves in business than in taking care of the students, and faculty in general do very little to oppose this besides voice a complaint or two about the lack of intellectual preparation on the part of incoming freshman.
They will have much to answer for.
Regarding tattoos:
I saw more tattoo magazines in that Fayetteville B&N than I have seen anywhere else, with the exception perhaps of bookstores in SF or Berkeley.
Another collection that might be of interest: Return to Chivalry: How Contemporary Men Can Recover the Dignity of Living for a Higher Purpose by Peter T. Singleton.
Praesidium archive
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