Fixing education

It cannot be reformed

Sorry for my absence, dear readers. Mrs. Surak and I have been dealing with chronic health issues for many years. I think we are making some progress, with God’s help, and that could be the subject of another column.

I have been planning a series of “Fixing _____” columns, recommending changes to areas like education, health, Congress, and the states. Let us start with education.

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I have spent my career in academia. Academia, and increasingly the lower grades (K-12), have very little to do with education. Establishment educational institutions are indoctrination centers, pushing a political agenda to the left of Mao Zedong. (Maoist China did not tolerate sexual deviancy.) Academics do not care about the employability of their graduates. They are openly hostile to the society that funds them.

It was not always thus. Western universities were founded a bit more than eight hundred years in Europe to help preserve the existing civilization. Today’s schools are staffed and administered largely by revolutionary cultural Marxists. The hypocrisy of these people, who are frequently paid more than the President of the United States, is unbearable.

I have read recently that student debt cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. This observation may explain a survey I read recently, that analyzed political preferences as a function of income level and highest degree attained. It turns out that the part of the population that is most heavily “very liberal” (what we call leftist) is characterized by two things; they have college degrees (often graduate degrees), and their salaries are low. This combination contradicts the lie that high school students are told by academia: that a college degree (ANY college degree) leads to higher lifetime income.

Thank goodness, many young people and their parents are waking up to the lies. These young adults are going into trades that are associated with a higher income increment compared to that associated with academia, and virtually no student debt.

I often read outrageous incidents in academia on social media. My response is predictable: “Why do Americans fund this?” Just imagine what would happen to an American who proposed, during World War 2, that America should fund the regimes of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Imperial Japan. More recently, leftists howled with outrage that Israel did not fund and feed Hamas while the latter was firing rockets into Israel, imprisoning kidnapped Israeli civilians underground, and raping them.

The MAGA movement has dutifully accepted President Trump’s decision to rescue academia financially by admitting 600 thousand hostile communist students to America, on the grounds that otherwise many colleges would close. My response: what is the problem with that? Academia is openly hostile towards whites, towards men, towards Christians and Jews, and most certainly towards conservatives. Why should we fund them?

Austrian economics posits that you get more of anything you subsidize, and less of anything you tax. Governmental funding of academia has facilitated the explosion of educational costs, and the explosion of non-teaching activist staff (the DEI-social justice enforcers). One consequence of stopping the subsidies would be to force an immediate accounting within academic institutions: a determination of who is adding value, and who is a parasite. Suddenly, the colleges that survive will become a lot more affordable.

Leftists will howl that anyone supporting such a program must be opposed to education. This is similar to their howling that anyone who disagrees with DEI is racist. Conservatives always respond to such accusations defensively: “No, I am not opposed to education; no, I am not racist,” and so on. Such defenses always fail in the court of public opinion. Conservatives should point out that academia is itself opposed to education.

But we should be even more proactive. The left treats any disagreement as a fight to the death. The expectation that students turn in their homework on time is now considered racist. This is not a fight that can be won by denying false accusations. Conservatives, if they seriously want to win, have got to get up the nerve to take the fight to the enemy. The left is opposed to education (else why oppose vouchers?). The left is racist. The left is greedy. Everything the left accuses us of, they are.

Parents should have a right to see what is going on the classrooms they are paying for. A webcam should be on in the classroom. I have nothing to hide in my classroom. Why do some of my colleagues feel the need to hide?

Our college offers elementary-school level material not merely as a for-credit course, but even as a 100-level course. They should lose accreditation on that basis alone.

At our college, faculty are under no supervision to ensure they are teaching the full complement of learning objectives. This is deliberate, to frustrate those of us trying to ensure consistency, rigor, and value. The only metric employed for faculty is to minimize the amount of student complaints, whether valid or not.

Our college offers a core curriculum with very few required courses, but many options. The highest level mathematics course required for everyone covers junior high school algebra.

If colleges and universities are required to co-sign student loans, making them responsible for up to half of the amount borrowed, then they would be less likely to engage in predatory marketing to students who either could not graduate or could not get a lucrative job upon graduation.

EDIT: I want to thank reader FreedomFighter for identifying another important issue: endowments. The endowments of some universities are larger than the GDP of most countries - and they are subject to much lower tax than we are! They achieve their “non-profit” status by inflating the salaries of the top administrators. I would abolish “non-profit” status throughout the economy; no institution should be exempt, whether a foundation (Ford, Gates, Rockefeller, Soros, Tides), a university, or a religious institution.

The first step in survival must be to stop assisting your attacker. Long ago, I gave up interest in the innumerable projects to reform academia. It cannot be reformed. They openly admit their desire to destroy Western civilization. Stop funding academia.

This imperative meshes well with the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s observation that “Socialism stops working when you run out of other people’s money.”