Columnist and radio talk show host Victor Davis Hanson has authored an intriguing piece. Hanson writes that historically, colleges and universities were thought to further four (4) primary social goals:
(1) they supposedly taught students how to reason inductively and “imparted an aesthetic sense through acquiring knowledge of Michelangelo, the Battle of Gettysburg, “Medea” and “King Lear,” Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” and astronomy and Euclidean geometry”;
(2) “campuses encouraged edgy speech and raucous expression”;
(3) “four years of college trained students for productive careers. Implicit was the university’s assurance that its degree was a wise career investment”;
and
(4) “universities were not monopolistic price gougers.”
The American undergraduate university is now failing on all four counts.”
Today’s colleges and universities are (1) expensive (2) havens for thought control which (3) fail to educate many or even most students to a level of basic scientific, cultural or informational literacy and which leave many students at a DISADVANTAGE in the cold, cruel world that students find themselves in after college. Many colleges have graduated students who CANNOT READ. Instead of exposing students to new frontiers or innovative ideas, many colleges now shelter students from inconvenient worldviews or unpopular opinions.
And as previously described in this site, today’s PUBLIC colleges have failed even in achieving their very PURPOSE FOR EXISTENCE, the notion that public taxpayers should support them to give the poor access to higher education. Today’s college students are LESS LIKELY than the students of yesteryear to be drawn from the lowest quintiles of the socoeconomy.
