College just ain’t what it used to be unless your major field is one of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. These courses, for obvious reasons, still require students to know how to reason, problem solve and prove their work with complete documentation on how they arrived at their answer. The STEM curriculum is as strict and thorough as it ever was. Outside of STEM is an entirely different world where feelings are examined and every answer is valid and no proof is ever required as long as your position is correct. The reality of the problem is covered very neatly in the fact that at the United States’ largest university system, California State Universities, nearly 40% of incoming freshmen require remedial math and English courses after failing the entrance competency tests. That is 40% failing both math and English, the individual numbers are difficult to come by but if we remember correctly the numbers approached 60% needing remedial English and over 75% required remedial math after failing the entrance exams nation wide if one leaves out students enrolling in STEM course majors. What is even more disturbing is what follows once they begin to take actual college courses, for some starting in their second year, that the courses are watered down and grades often inflated in order to not deter the students from continuing to pay the outrageous tuitions and also allow the universities to collect Federal monies provided by the department of education to cover costs of required courses in politically correct course work with such courses stressing identity-politics emphasizing racial, sexual and religious fault lines and newthink definitions where words mean what you wish them to mean and not necessarily what your parents knew them to mean.
STEM Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
The reality is that students currently owe over one-trillion dollars in student loan debt, and hold diplomas in subjects so weak and leaving them completely unprepared for the workplace as they were for college upon arrival taking competency exams which remanded the majority to taking remedial courses just to achieve a minimal entrance level of competence. Many major employers have been required to hire teachers very often from STEM courses to provide remedial education for entrance level positions due to the lack of qualified entrance personnel. So, students graduate high school and gain entrance to a college, often their state university system as they are required by statute to accept every high school graduate with a grade point average above 2.0 or possibly as low as 1.5 or as high as 2.5 depending on the state. These students grades were inflated in high school and upon reaching college require remedial classes in order to be capable of even doing freshman basic courses. They then graduate college and apply for a job and many major employers are required to give college graduates remedial education such that they can perform entrance level jobs. Is it just us or does this indicate a problem somewhere in the education system from the very beginning to the very highest levels?
When there are reports of teachers in grade school teaching about alternative sexual identities and how the students should question their sexual identities, as they may not actually be the gender their chromosomes forced upon them, this is a problem. Having condoms available for the asking in elementary schools is a problem. Allowing students to arrange for an abortion through the school without parental consent or even parental notification even after the fact is a problem. Teaching sexuality and sexual positions in junior high schools is a problem. Having teachers and counselors having prescriptions for psychotropic drugs such as Prozac and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to treat ADHD or antidepressants is a problem. These are not medical professionals and the physicians who proscribe such drugs largely on the recommendation of teachers and counselors is simply dangerous and can seriously harm these young students irrevocably. That is dangerously wrong. When teachers in any level of public schools tell their students that their parents should not be permitted to ground them and that restricting their rights such as the right to use a phone, watch television, listen to music, watch whatever shows they wish, send them to their room or any form of punishment and that any student who is suppressed by their parents in such a manner can simply tell the teacher and they will see to it that the situation is remedied such that their parents will be counselled and will never try to harm them again, that is a problem. When the school tries to replace the parents in raising the children and use the power of child protective services to threaten parents with the loss of their child, that is seriously wrong. These are things which either we or people we have spoken with have experienced with public schools in the suburbs of some of the major cities in the United States. Perhaps the increasing numbers of children being home-schooled is a direct result of the degrading of the education in the public schools where instead of an education students are receiving indoctrination and instead of being taught to think, they are being instructed what to think.
Where we once had the three R’s; Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic, the schools have replaced them with the three new’s; newthink, newspeak, and newfacts. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley and even Albert Camus would understand the new school systems, and that is far from being a good thing because these are three authors the students will never be recommended to read by their school. These are too precocious and controversial plus they are the wrong gender, race, religion and simply unacceptable. Most public schools no longer give assignments which require students to read literature, to read books, instead they receive handouts which are mostly political opinions and always environmentally sensitive and gender sensitive not to mention politically correct through and through. Often these handouts are to be left at schools and not taken home as that might arouse a nosy parent to read the handout and maybe become concerned. The schools do not want concerned parents, they like the parent to remain unworried and when they have parent-teacher conference they usually talk about the behavior of the child and the concerns of the teacher and the schools and possibly they will have a counselor to add their expertise. The really unfortunate parent is the one who asks too many questions as they will need to be reminded who the child belongs to, which is the school. The school must not be questioned and students who have their education augmented at home and will ask questions when what the school teaches does not quite match what the child was taught at home, well, that is when the real problems begin. That child is labeled disruptive and the parent is warned that the child has been displaying an unhealthy attitude in class and questions authority. Children must never question the school’s authority, only the parent’s authority is questionable. Lucky is the parent who has their children’s trust and whose children believe them over the schools.
The major question is when will this system collapse in from lack of integral support? Industries are requiring better-trained employees and the major universities are turning out protestors and snowflakes who cannot even take a discouraging word, let alone rebuke. The universities are so busy providing safe spaces and trigger warnings and addressing micro-aggressions that they have no time for actual education. There are legions of professors and indoctrinated “sensitive” students ready to react should, heavens forbid (and do not mention the concept of heaven at one of these universities, too Christian), a speaker get invited who lacks the proper temperament, attitude, world view, politics or anything which might sound adverse to the propaganda taught in their classes, there will be an upheaval to prevent their polluting these butterflies delicate minds which are as fragile as are their wings on which they have yet to learn to fly. They are told only the political correct, ecologically friendly, earth preserving, liberated views which must be preserved and protected from contrary truths as the students are taught that the ideas and views they are presented in their gentle classes is the only truth and all else which does not agree with the university leftist teachings are evil and monstrous and require being shouted down and never permitted to gain traction as once that occurs their entire world will collapse.
That actually might be the single truth they are being told, that once reality breaks through the painted glass windows on which the drawings of butterflies, kittens and puppies are drawn for their protection, that will start the end of their safe and warm little world and the truth that they have been robbed of an education will tear their world apart leaving these fragile adult-children shaken and bruised. They will hopefully feel rage filled form of anger that will drive them to self-teach those things they should have been taught so far back in their education that it is scary. One thing that will rip holes in their lives is when they realize they were never taught to read, only to recognize the words that their educators desired they know. Being taught whole word recognition is not learning to read, it is being indoctrinated and denied the ability to learn on your own. The learning will begin there, with the painful path of learning to read all over again, this time by simply saying the letters of each word together faster and faster until it sounds like a word you have possibly heard in a song or on a television show. Then the lights start to go on and education will finally start for real. Slowly at first, the words come and then reading becomes easier and a pleasure and then one can read the forbidden works. May we recommend the gentlemen we named earlier, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Albert Camus. For George Orwell we recommend Animal Farm and 1984 where in the second you will recognize some of your educational indoctrination and understand newspeak, which is nothing but whole word recognition and political correctness. And for Aldous Huxley we recommend Brave New World where you may recognize the betas of the society and begin to feel deeply for the savages and one in particular as well as his mother who sought her heaven in little blue pills and became a Soma version of a Snowblind Friend (Steppenwolf, song below). Albert Camus is a bit more difficult to recommend as he has written so much worth reading in philosophy, novels, short stories, but perhaps starting with collections of essays such as “Resistance, Rebellion, and Death,” then move on to short novels such as “The Stranger” and “The Silent Men.” From here, the classics are fair game such as “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas, which is a great adventure and “Last of the Mohicans” by James Fennimore Cooper and our last recommendation will be “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift. For those more into love stories or relations there are numerous novels such as “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens and for science fiction there is Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and lastly, for the macabre there is always anything by Edgar Allen Poe. On a side note about Poe, one of the most beautiful love poems ever written is his Annabel Lee.
Also read newspapers including ones your professors warned you were evil, new ideas cannot actually hurt you, only ignorance can be dangerous. Seek out information and then reason what you read and hear and come to your own conclusions. Once you get a basis, return to school, take STEM courses, and learn skills that cannot be replaced by a robot in five to ten years. The education the university likely gave you would not even get you a job cleaning up behind a robot, which would be performed by a robot anyway. The age where robots take over jobs that do not require free thought is coming at us very quickly and when you and others out of university before you realize some truths and demand the minimum wage be increased to fifteen dollars an hour, then we will see robots all the faster as robots are a relatively high initial investment but then pay for themselves within a decade and then they keep working with minimal complaints making profits and not demanding promotions or higher pay or even a coffee break or lunch hour or overtime and work twenty-four seven with only brief downtime for upgrades and periodic maintenance. It really is no wonder that increasing the minimum wage will price workers right out of their jobs, and that is not a joke but a reality. Education, a proper and real true education is priceless and knowledge is the one commodity for which employers are willing to pay. Skills are the other commodity that will get you a position that pays well. Repairing robots will be a decent paying job, actually a profession. The only problem is within the next twenty or so years there will be robots which repair robots including repairing any malfunctioning repair robot. Then only Einstein types will have jobs and the robots will keep the more entertaining from amongst us as pets and the rest, well, that is something we had best hope the robots are programmed to care for us and like us or we will soon become extinct after inventing our replacement. Can anybody say Cylons?
Cylons Both Original and the Newer Version
Beyond the Cusp
Beyond the Cusp 