Submitted by Charles Knighton
“Each child who goes to a secondary school should do at least one year of national service… thus making a contribution to national development as well as becoming familiar with the world that they now only encounter way too late—the world of work.” Orlando Marville, Education cuts – March 12 Advocate
While Mr. Marville’s article contains much to commend itself to the educational establishment of Barbados, I was most taken by his suggestion of the need for students to become acquainted with the practical workings of the real world before being indoctrinated by the progressive academic theories so prevalent in today’s universities. One reason universities are able to indoctrinate students is that students enter college young and unworldly.
Someone with life experience is far more likely than a kid just out of high school to understand that the best formula for avoiding many of life’s pitfalls is personal responsibility—get a job, get married, and then have children—not government help.
Teenagers who spend a year or two before going to college working—in a restaurant, at an office, or in national service—will mature far more than they would after a similar amount of time at college. And maturity is an inoculation against leftism.
For those who may feel that I overestimate the pernicious influence of the progressive agenda promulgated by today’s universities, consider the fate of the once uplifting study of the humanities. To major in English at a fine university, you’d think you’d need to know something of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. Evidently, not any more. After revolts by young, progressive faculty members at many universities requirements that majors study the works of these dead white males have been dumped in favor of courses in Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Disability and Sexuality Studies.
This has now become a widespread trend in the study of the humanities: an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. A humanities education once gave students a tour through the finest knowledge, philosophical thought, and artistry of Western civilization. But many postmodern academics and students view all that as a dated legacy of the “Empire.” So the humanities are now the study of oppression in all its forms—of women, of people of color, of people of different sexual orientations. Plato? Shakespeare? Mozart? Just three more oppressive white males. No wonder interest in the humanities is in steep decline.
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