Reforming Higher Education

The “Why Conservatives Fail” tab in the menu above links to articles about the information war that our side continues to fail to get serious about fighting. It’s not a topic easily summed up, but here’s one way to say it: If we’re going to continue to allow the radical dishonest left to own the institutions that dominate the culture, the country is doomed. What are those institutions? Pop culture, the mainstream media, and the K-college education system.

One important step forward into the battle is the effort to reform higher education — here is Abraham H. Miller writing at American Thinker:

As the price of higher education has gone up, both the quality of the education and the opportunities it creates have vastly diminished.

What has survived is the myth of higher education: the idea that higher education is a means to a professional career and social mobility. For tens of thousands of college graduates each year, that has proven to be a cruel hoax.

For too many, graduation has meant carrying the burden of staggering debt without the marketable skills to pay it off.

How did we get here? The basic intellectual skills required to get through a real education are possessed by probably no more than 7.5% to 15% of the college-age population.

A real education not only means near endless hours of immersion in books but also some enjoyment of the process. It means an ability to deal with abstract thought and ideas that are frequently counter-intuitive. It means an ability to see how concepts organize information, how inductive thinking produces general principles, and how deductive reasoning produces hypotheses.

But most undergraduates could no more get through courses in scientific method, philosophy of science, and logic than they could get through a course in multivariate statistics.

Read more: American Thinker

Image credit: wk1003mike / Shutterstock.