The Public Education Dilemma

Mark Greathouse

Read Part 1

(3/2021) I began last month’s op-ed with a quote from Irish poet William Butler Yeats: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." Well, we seem to have some half-filled pails and no fire. While the K-12 public education system is failing us, the higher education system – our colleges and universities – put the proverbial nails in the public education coffin. Higher education is a monster multi-headed hydra. College ready? How about life ready?

Many folks describe today’s college students as naVve overly-protected buttercups subject to the destructive influences of far-left-leaning progressive academics bent on destroying the greatest nation on earth, the United States of America. Keep in mind that what is called "progressivism" in our nation was born out of Marxism in the 1870s and became the mantra of the likes of Robert LaFollette, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and utopian socialist Edward Bellamy. Only the U.S. Constitution blocks the progressive leftist agenda, and it’s under attack in our colleges and universities.

Today’s colleges echo the failure of the K-12 system which promotes preparing students for college but readies very few for real life. Students entering college are ill-prepared to deal with a competitive win-lose environment, to value reliability, to be motivated, and to strive to truly matter in this world. It is essential that our citizens be prepared for life by being well-educated in topics that will enable them to effectively contribute to society. Instead, politics and leftist philosophies have muddied the education waters. It’s become a battle of competing ideologies bent on control of the masses. Over multiple generations, our colleges and universities have insidiously become a leftist indoctrination machine touting anti-exceptional, anti-individual, and anti-free speech agendas. It’s a subtle re-education program on a scale comparable to the Uhygers in western China.

American philosopher and professor Allan Bloom noted in his best-selling The Closing of the American Mind, "Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it." Bloom saw American democracy as enabling colleges to host vulgarized ideas of negativity and despair coupled with social and moral relativism cloaked in shrouds of tolerance. And keep in mind that teachers in the K-12 system are graduates of this hydra of a system. It offers a vicious cycle of failure, a sort of circular firing squad executing our nation’s future.

Roughly two-thirds of K-12 students go on to a 2- or 4-year college. For what it’s worth, 36.6 percent of women and 35.4 percent of men or roughly half of those who enter actually graduate from college. Roughly one third of K-12 grads go on to trades, the military, or make other choices. We also know that the non-graduate half of those who enter college will go on to other life career choices without ever receiving college degrees. This begs the questions of whether the system has failed them or whether some sort of natural selection is at work and we simply don’t need so many college graduates. While it’s tempting to refer back to the 6th Century philosopher Lao Tzu’s thoughts on keeping minds empty and bellies full, it’s notable that college grads still earn on average twice as much as folks trained in trades. Clearly, their bellies are full…it’s the empty minds we should worry about.

Moving on to the higher education hydra itself, there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit to straighten out. What return are we getting for our tuition dollars? Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you must be aware of the cancel culture and hardcore stifling of free speech rampant on college campuses. There is an ideological imbalance among the academic community, as better than 90 percent of professors vote for and/or contribute to the Democratic Party. Despite any efforts at neutrality, this imbalance naturally leads to the leftist indoctrination that we see at the polls, among the violent leftist "protestors" on our streets, and with the aforementioned free speech cancellations. Students are brainwashed with abominations like Agenda 21 and the 1619 Project. While leftist political ideology is a huge problem, the higher education hydra features other ills.

Lamentably, much of the first 2 years of college are naught but a reconstituted version of high school ostensibly to get many students reasonably equipped to perform basic reading, writing, and math. There’s also a vicious cycle of professors and textbook publishers colluding to rip off students with exorbitant pricing under the guise of ensuring updated material…for whatever that material is actually worth. The functions of textbooks and professors are to guide students; there’s no need for annual update of books or professors. And there’s the issue of the government offering a profligate array of grants and loans that have driven up costs to students. It should be obvious why the monster hydra serves as an apt metaphor for higher education.

Leftist college outcomes are reinforced by big-tech social media tracking private lives while promoting left-leaning group think and censoring opposing views. It’s the tyranny found in George Orwell’s 1984. Social media functions as 1984’s interactive telescreens spying on us all. It’s a slippery slope to totalitarianism. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth blares, "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." Its power is based upon repealing the past…not unlike our public education system with its systemic reconstitution of the past with catch-all evils like social justice, racism, and cancel culture. American exceptionalism is denigrated, as students are brainwashed with leftist dogma about the misery and evils of present-day society. Many students are subjected to what has been termed Democratic Socialism which is simply a slippery slope to Communism, as those dumbed-down souls who identify as the petty bourgeoisie eventually overwhelm the supposed proletariat. Tragic.

Can higher education be improved? Certainly. The multi-serpent-headed hydra of Greek mythology that is American higher education can be defeated…and defeated it must be. We need to make learning about valuing students, not the power politics of inculcating globalist dogma. Debates must be balanced and ideas free to be exchanged and openly challenged (consideration of the rhetorical methods of Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato might help). We need college majors with clear career path prospects and courses focused on core major requirements and practical real-world applications. Students must be encouraged to pursue internships, practical mentoring, and other real-world studies applications as might be found with actual businesses.

Our public education systems are indeed broken but not beyond repair. The grown-ups must set positive, constructive, adult examples. Now is when students should truly get to be first, to light Yeats’ fire, to take on the real world. It’s about educating individuals, not crowds. It is paramount that colleges and universities deliver that preparation through optimally educating our children for productive lives. If the multi-headed monster hydra of education does continue on its current relentlessly destructive path, we are doomed. We must snatch our nation from the gaping jaws of progressivism, and that begins with salvaging our education system. Our nation’s future is at stake. Just sayin’.

Read past edition of the Tumbleweeds

Read other articles by Mark Greathouse