McDonaldization of Education and the Civil Religion of the Left

As I neared completion of my academic program in 2009, I was surrounded by professors who ascribed the economic crisis to “unfettered capitalism”. One of my instructors lamented “if only we had the state sponsor all of our classes, we would treat students as intellects rather than as clients”, implying that if only the universities had more influence over public policy, the disaster would have been averted.  Yet strangely, policies that led to this outcome were developed and implemented by the socio-economic elites who were educated in the most prestigious of American institutions. Most professors see no reason to defend such views on campuses because they reflect the consensus of the academic class. Yet, if they were to make an honest effort to substantiate their point of view, they would probably attribute these failures to the Philosopher King thesis gone askew.

            Upon graduation, I scrambled to earn a living writing papers for college students, most of whom were much more interested in acquiring credentials than in learning. Seemingly, they and I had an unspoken agreement that our transaction was to be treated in strictly economic terms. In other words, there was nothing intrinsically valuable about education and acquisition of credentials was the sole purpose of matriculation. Once in a great while, I’d receive a hostile email from a disgruntled professor questioning the premises of our arrangement and swearing to “wage war” on myself and saboteurs of the “educational process” of my ilk.  In his effusive tirade, one of such instructors urged me to wonder why I “contribute to the dumbing-down of this nation” and whether I realized that “lack of education” was the reason for the financial crisis that left me writing papers.

            Such a brazen allegation laced with seemingly absurd presumptions made me wonder if he believed in anything he wrote. For that matter, I was puzzled how any reasonable person could even entertain such notions. The connection between the financial crisis and the education system seemed tenuous at best. Yet, his irate missive prompted to think carefully about what he may have meant. Or at any rate, what argument a reasonable person his persuasion could mount.

            Contrary to the popular allegation from the right, these professors would insist that they do not want the educated elite to run the country. They would further maintain that the true purpose of education is to teach students to think for themselves. Moreover, the economic crisis was nothing but a result of the educated elites abusing public trust. From this perspective, such unseemly outcomes were possible only because the citizenry is not well educated enough to take matters of policy into their own hands. That is part of the reason why America is a representative rather than a direct democracy.

            In their most disingenuous vein, one of such professors would ask what this country would be like if it was a direct democracy. That is, how much more just and prosperous would America be if every citizen was a critical thinker willing to fulfill his civic duty to participate in the political process? As I have explained in our foregoing discussions, nothing could be further from the true objective of American education (http://attackthesystem.com/2015/11/21/the-post-education-era-academic-institutions-in-the-age-of-philistinism/). The ideals of egalitarianism and an educated citizenry are mutually exclusive. If they weren’t, the academe would have had no reason to continuously lower its standards as it does now.

            Consistently with Keith Preston’s of identity in the rubric of American imperialism, the university acts as a secularized version of the Catholic Church (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ag0fIa4Vgk).  The practices of distributing degrees in exchange for woefully mediocre work is no more commendable than that of selling indulgences. In both cases, the buyer receives an intrinsically worthless service in exchange for a simple payment and a number of fool’s errands. Similarly to the modus operandi of transnational corporations, universities aim to sell a product that is predictable and efficient. The modern universities operate consistently with the McDonaldization paradigm in the following respects.

Efficiency – Just as McDonalds aspires to minimize the time expended on operations, universities tend to be more concerned with their professors submitting grades on time than in ensuring that their classes are genuinely educative.

Calculability – Similarly to how McDonalds rewards their workers for the volume they output rather than the quality they produce; universities expand the sizes of their classrooms to the maximum, often by lowering standards. The proliferation of degree mills and inclusion of online classes into the curricula of four year universities amply corroborate this point. The principle of calculability further manifests in light of the diminution of the rapid replacement of tenue track jobs with that of part-time TA positions. This further conveys an emphasis on quantity over quality.

Predictability – Resembling McDonalds’ commitment to providing customers with the same service at all locations, college students can expect routinized work from all academic institutions. Regardless of whether one attends Harvard or an online degree mill, they will receive a hefty dose of indoctrination on white privilege, social justice, environmentalism, radical feminism and LGBT activism. Admittedly, some institutions have lower admission rates and higher standards than others, very few universities maintain rigorous standards and even encourage students to think autonomously. The majority of four year institutions have an admission rate in excess of 50% and their graduates average a GPA surpassing 3.3. While the most prestigious of academic institutions may expect their students to provide an accurate account of the assigned readings and implement elementary techniques of analysis, they scarcely expect their pupils to produce an inkling of original thought. As for degree mills, unrevised assignment instructions are recycled from institution to institution and instructors tend to grade papers without reading them.
Control – Oral examinations or projects customized to evaluate each student’s potential to think creatively or critically tend to be limited. Instead, the majority of academic institutions rely heavily on standardized tests that can be manipulated by dull students armed with dog-tricks. Further systemization of education manifests in light of how even math homework is now graded by machines that evaluate students based on how precisely they follow arbitrary procedures. The increased proliferation of degree mills that operate according to highly structured, predictable and recyclable curricula is yet another instance of McDonaldized control.

            In essence, the university is a transnational corporation that operates consistently with the cultural narrative of American imperialism. As such, it effaces all forms of identity based on anything other than crass materialism or social standing within a group. That is partly very few academic administrators mourn the declining intellectual value of a college education and even fewer have qualms about the pervasive culture of political correctness undermining academic freedom. Reminiscently of how Amazon and Wal-Mart want customers from all demographic groups to purchase their products, the universities are looking to enroll as many students as possible, regardless of their background or academic capabilities.

            In order for the universities to achieve this objective, the hyper-PC environment must define the rules of engagement on campus. What is truly important for the university administrators is not that the students learn, but only that they do not offend each other. Yet in order to procure the chattel needed for this achievement, they will need the munificent support of the government. Without the abundance of easily accessible student loans, it is impossible for universities to persuade tens of thousands of millennials to continue taking essentially worthless classes for sky-rocketing costs. Furthermore, this feat would also be impossible if such graduates had no hope of finding jobs upon graduation. This realistic fear that many college students share can be assuaged by the expansion of private and public bureaucracies ostensibly created to serve social justice, but actually produce “make-work” for hopelessly incompetent graduates who can scarcely eke out a coherent paragraph.

            Given that the nation continues to move to the left despite the Obama administration’s apparent failures to revitalize the economy and promote group cohesion among the citizenry, it is clear that the strategy of the academic left has been an enormous success (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/why-america-is-moving-left/419112/?utm_source=SFFB). The Democratic party continues to applaud the recent changes in the academic milieu not despite its McDonaldization, but because of it. In effect, the university has become an extension of the government’s executive branch that indoctrinates the youth even more effectively than the liberal media.  Ideas that were once seen as the musings of the Democratic Party’s most radicalized factions are now indelibly embedded into the nation’s collective consciousness. The ideology of the academic class is no longer a view of the self-secluded Ivory Tower bureaucrats, it is now emerging as the basis of the left’s civil religion.

In light of how compatible this narrative is with the agenda of American imperialism, the civil religion of the left will soon become the core premise in the nation’s worldview. The American identity is in crisis and further developments in this direction will continue to destabilize it. Just as post-modernism has been canonized in many departments of the humanities, cultural relativism will soon be the basis of the general American ideology. In such a worldview, there is no place for rugged individualism, individual rights, inner-directedness or any other ideal that the founding generation aspired to preserve. In the new American Civil Religion, weakness rather than strength will be deemed the cardinal virtue where victimhood rather than self-sufficiency will be the ultimate expression of the new American Dream.  

Post-Educational era

The Post-Education era: Academic Institutions in the Age of Philistinism

            Attitudes toward hierarchies shed light on fundamental differences between the left and the right. The latter tends to be skeptical of them and for this reason, leftists often rally around the ideal of equality. On the other hand, the right views hierarchies as desirable because they promote social order.  Meritocracy is generally the underlying premise behind the argument regarding the necessity of hierarchy. It is often assumed that the elites deserve to be in power because they are more qualified to govern than the ordinary people. Clearly, this principle can be abused and in many cases, one becomes a member of the elite simply by being born into the ruling class.

            The elites aspired to remedy the intellectual weaknesses of their youngsters by subjecting them to a rigorous education. That is why it was quite common for nobles to be tutored by the leading scholars of their day and age. When Diogenes the Cynic was sold into slavery, he was purchased by an affluent estate owner in the capacity of a philosophy tutor for his son. Alexander the Great was educated by Aristotle himself and Descartes taught Queen Isabella of Sweden. In many cases, the children of the aristocrats simply lack the intellectual ability to be well-educated and the upper-class routinely import talent into their ranks. Edmund Burke is the case in point as he was not born into the aristocracy, but proved worthy of joining them.

            Throughout the history of the Western civilization, the relationship between membership in the elite social class and education has always seemed clear. The aristocrats always made a special effort to educate their young to ensure that they would become worthy successors. As such, they were expected to not only manage their parents’ estates competently, but to also pursue political engagement in a manner that served the class interests of the ruling families. This form of education has been unabashedly elitist and it is because of rather than despite that, the students who received such schooling achieved considerable intellectual growth. Those who were quite gifted were expected to work hard at their studies and the less talented were expected to work even harder.

            Those who wished to make education available for the general public were often forced to concede that educators can only offer opportunities for intellectual self-enhancement. However, the onus was on the students to take advantage of these opportunities by displaying hard-work and natural talent. Yet the proponents of this position believed that when given such chances to get ahead in life, they would undoubtedly take advantage of them and positive social changes will occur as a result. It was even hoped that as more people born into plebeian surroundings gained access to higher education, society would become more egalitarian. At the core, those who agitated for democracy insisted that a well-educated citizenry was basis of social progress. 

Yet, the advent of the Industrial Revolution soon cast doubt upon the viability of this strategy. As the advent of capitalism greatly contributed to the prosperity of United Kingdom and the United States, these two countries began entering the third stage of demographic transition. Therein, their population increased because more children born to non-privileged families received the basic necessities for survival well into adulthood.  Perturbed by the hypothesis of a Malthusian catastrophe, Francis Galton embarked upon a systematic study of heritability of intelligence.

Galton’s findings led him to believe that intellectual ability was heritable to a significant degree and that the elites were more likely to be genetically endowed with potential of this nature than their less privileged counterparts.  Building on this premise, Charles Spearman developed the theoretical framework known as the “g-factor” suggesting that one is born with a certain degree of intellectual potential and one’s natural talent tends to be spread out evenly throughout various cognitive tasks.  In light of the troubling possibility that the less talented greatly outnumbered the most talented and the offspring for both groups could survive, the Malthusian catastrophe appeared to be a realistic possibility. In effect, this posed a troubling question to progressive activists wishing to “democratize knowledge” by making education available to all Americans. Is the education system truly making the average person more intelligent or is it unduly rewarding the least intelligent and the least industrious members of society?

            By the early 20^th century, American legislators have become preoccupied with the notion of dysgenics as those with the most mal-adjusted genes seemed to reproduce the most. Following the paradigm developed by Horace Mann, educators cherished very little hope in empowering all children to become intellectuals. Instead, public schools have mostly concerned themselves with creating a citizenry that was obedient, orderly and suitable for work in a highly regimented factory environment where conformity was deemed more important than intelligence or creativity. With these developments, an eminent 20^th century sociologist, David Reisman chronicled a fundamental change in the American national character featuring a shift away from the inner-directed mentality to the other-directed. This shift emerged as the driving force behind the cultural revolution of the 1960s and its numerous implications for modern America.

Up until the middle of the 20^th century, few disputed the notion that higher education was to be reserved for the few members of society who truly were intellectually gifted. The incontrovertibility of this precept came into question with the conclusion of World War II where the GI bill empowered hundreds of war veterans to receive college education. Accompanying the shift toward the other-directed perspective and the economic hardships of the Great Depression, the egalitarian left made inroads into college campuses. As students of limited academic potential changed the collegiate milieu, the meritocratic right struggled to defend their belief that education was to be reserved only for the gifted and the industrious. As the Red Diaper babies reached college age by the 1960s, the era of campus radicalism took root and laid down the foundation for doctrines that characterize the modern left including Marxism, Radical Feminism, and Post-Modernism.

            Despite the evident differences between these schools of thought, their underlying assumptions were fundamentally egalitarian rather than meritocratic. Marxism presupposed that there is no such thing as human nature and psychological traits that people attribute to human nature are merely a result of capitalist exploitation. Therefore, the purpose of education is to divest the young minds of bourgeoisie assumptions about genetic differences in ability between people and their connections with positive life outcomes.  Building on the Marxist assumption about human nature, feminists maintained that the subjugation of women was also a result of a “capitalist false consciousness” and students should be educated to abandon the belief that there are biological differences between men and women.

Many post-modern theorists did not explicitly borrow the Marxist premise regarding the negation of human-nature, yet they embraced the element of relativism inherent in Marxism. Similarly to how their intellectual forebears maintained that capitalism shaped the collective consciousness of society, post-modernists maintained that the prevailing ethos also define human character and social action. With this rationale, they argued that all human perceptions are shaped by societal phenomena and therefore, all truth is relative. The position of total relativism has been buttressed by the drastic change in the demographic character which made the American society more multi-cultural. As the American milieu became more diverse, it has become impolite for the majority group to insist that newcomers assimilate to the American way of life and renounce all values incompatible with the traditional American worldview.

The proponents of multiculturalism naturally forged an alliance with the academic left and together, they endeavored to achieve a profound transformation of the American collective consciousness. Altogether repudiating the traditional American values of individualism, inner-directedness and meritocracy, they unabashedly set about to instill the ethic of equality into the American collective consciousness. Almost uniformly, they were hostile to all theories suggesting that groups or individuals differed with respect to talent, ability, achievement or any other measure of merit. To them, the very idea of distinguishing between people based on merit resembled systematic oppression.

By their lights, Blacks scored lower on IQ tests than Whites because the Whites have colonized and oppressed Africa. If a student belonging to a minority group underperformed in school, the problem was never to be attributed to his lack of intelligence or industriousness. Instead, it was to be attributed to his circumstances such as domestic abuse or exposure to neighborhood violence. It goes without saying that these factors were not to be imputed to moral failures of his parents, neighbors or other individuals of minority status. Instead, it was to be ascribed to systematic oppression that condemns all minorities to a miserable existence. On the other hand, if a white student performs well academically, he ought to “check his privileges” instead of feeling proud of himself.

Conspicuously absent from this analysis of life outcomes concerning race is that Asians tend to outperform whites with respect to IQ, academic achievement, professional success and socio-economic status. Even more glaringly missing is the superior performance of high IQ minorities to whites with comparable IQs.  What is furthermore problematic with the academic left’s position is that despite the enormous government assistance impoverished minorities received, a significant portion of them remain penurious and dependent on the state (http://www.amazon.com/Losing-Ground-American-Social-1950-1980/dp/0465065880/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1448020445&sr=8-1&keywords=losing+ground). Moreover, there is little evidence suggesting that merely preventing people from discussing differences in life-outcomes by race bridges the gaps of socioeconomic inequality. In other words, there is no reason to believe that the mere ethic of equality ameliorates the plights of those whom the left regards as the most disadvantaged.

Bounded rationality typifies all ideological discourses and the left’s position is not an exception to this rule. While they cannot address all of the aforementioned objections to their position, they can try to prevent people from entertaining such ideas. As the ideology of academia became more uniform and intransigent toward the end of the 20^th century, the left increasingly concerned itself with controlling the scope of discourse on campuses. The escalation of the hyper-PC environment across American campuses is the case in point and it bears testament to why universities are becoming places of intellectual coercion and behavioral prohibition (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/).

The academic moral climate is not entirely relativist, relativism is merely one of the two pillars of the modern left’s moral campus. According to Jonathan Haidt’s findings, modern liberals base their morality on two maxims: that of care and fairness http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/jonathan-haidt-the-moral-matrix-breaking-out-of-our-righteous-minds/) . Relativism buttresses the ethic of care as such an orientation urges people to regard all individuals and groups as deserving of their compassion, regardless of how perverse and reprehensible they may seem. Fairness as the left defines it, is merely a euphemism for the ethic of equality. The left tends to maintain that because all people have “inherent worth” it is only fair for everyone to live in roughly equal material comfort.

The combination of fairness and care creates a peculiar synthesis of fervent moralism and relativism which characterizes the mindset of the modern PC leftist. With such missionary zeal, the academic establishment maintains that if more people were to accept their point of view, a “better society” would be created under the banner of pluralistic tolerance, multiculturalism and equality of positive life outcome. Galvanized by these convictions, the Ivory Tower bureaucrats feverishly lobby the Democratic Party for increased government involvement in education. In light of the super-abundance of student loans that any student can access with ease, the proliferation of degree mills with over 90% admission rates and the rapid integration of degree mill curricula into four year universities, they have clearly succeeded.

Post-modernism heralds the end of the modern tradition in philosophy which was founded on objectivity of truth. The modern academic PC movement represents the integration of post-modernism not only into the scholarship of humanities, but also the general academic milieu. Given that truth is now deemed to be specific to cultural values all of which are deemed equally desirable under the ethic of equality, there is no basis for preservation of rigorous academic standards. Traditional education has always been founded on the concept of intellectual merit and because this ideal can no longer be sustained, academia has entered the post-educational era. 

Tyranny of the weak

Tyranny of the Weak

“There is no progress in human history. Democracy is a fraud. Human nature is primitive, emotional, unyielding. The smarter, abler, stronger, and shrewder take the lion's share. The weak starve, lest society become degenerate: One can compare the social body to the human body, which will promptly perish if prevented from eliminating toxins” Vilfredo Pareto

“Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.” Matthew 5:5

            The debate between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke is widely regarded as the basis between the left and the right. Thomas Paine regarded politics as similar to any other intellectual endeavor that requires the capacity for deep thought, critical analysis and creative synthesis. Resembling Plato’s Philosopher King, the politician regards the problems of society as that of “applied metaphysics” where solutions to all social ailments can be obtained through the exercise of reason alone. In line with Aristotle’s distinction between episteme and techne, Burke regarded politics as a practical rather than an intellectual endeavor. He rejected the doctrine of Socratic intellectualism that underpinned the Philosopher King thesis, asserting that people who know what constitutes the good are capable of acting in an evil manner.

On an even more fundamental level, Burke categorically dismissed the premise that one can obtain knowledge about any political problem through the exercise of the intellect alone. For Burke, one becomes a competent political decision-maker by learning history of his nation and getting a sense of his people. Just as is the case with any other craft, one becomes an effective political decision-maker through deliberate practice. In stark contrast, Thomas Paine believed that when a person becomes sufficiently intelligent, he becomes capable of making effective political decisions. On this basis, he supported greater access to education and his views are cited in defense of those who rallied behind Horace Mann’s endeavor to create publication education in America.

Throughout much of the history of Western civilization, education was only available to the social elites. Yet, the prosperity generated by the Industrial Revolution created the possibility of public education. At the turn of the 20^th century, the left clamored for the “democratization of knowledge” and their endeavor finally came to fruition in the aftermath of World War II. FDR’s GI bill flooded universities with students of rather limited intellectual potential. Slowly but surely, academic institutions began lowering their standards to accommodate the shifting demographics of the student-body.

 In line with Raymond Cattel’s forecast about dysgenics, the curriculum increasingly emphasized less abstract subjects by shifting focus away from purely theoretical disciplines and toward the political. As the Great Depression tilted American politics to the left and the new wave of European immigration fostered support for Marxist thought, the Frankfurt school of thought took root in American college campuses. The new generation of leftist pedagogues led their students to believe that class warfare was not only economic in character, but also contained racial and gender components. In stark contrast to the traditional American progressives who followed in the foot-steps of Thomas Paine, the new left viewed social problems from a collectivist rather than an individualist perspective. For these activists, the main purpose of political action was no longer to remove the restrictions to the individual’s flourishing, but to eliminate barriers to the advancement of marginalized groups.

To their minds, white man was the architect of such barriers and Hitler embodied the proof for this assertion. As Malcolm X was to later articulate, the white man was the ultimate enslaver, exploiter and the oppressor. In keeping with Marx’s premise that economic circumstances shape public opinion rather than vice-versa, the academic left maintained that white men created a complicated social structure of oppression. Therein, they exploited not only the poor, but also women and minorities. In their efforts to refute the claim that there were biological differences between genders and ethnic groups, the Ivory Tower activists became skeptical of the existence of human nature.

The more outspoken leftists such as Jean Paul Sartre, categorically maintained that human nature was an illusion and his chorus of aficionados across the Atlantic spawned theories that human nature was merely a social construct. Along with it, gender, race, ethnicity and culture were reduced to invidious social constructs that served white men at the expense of all other groups. In keeping with the Marxist narrative, they interpreted Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” not as an economic treatise on how countries become prosperous but as another white man’s rhetoric for preservation of an oppressive social order. Christianity was seen not as the collective consciousness of the Western civilization as Jung described it, but as an elaborate construct for oppressing women and people of color. Above all, the new left vociferously objected to the “white man canon” which they regarded as the basis of an oppressive society.

Building on the premise that human nature was a social construct, the thought leaders of the new left’s establishment reasoned that education can resolve all of societal ills. By their lights, the most accomplished of philosophers, artists and scientists were white men because this demographic group enjoyed the most access to education. Therefore, the “democratization” of knowledge should swiftly solve the problem by providing all marginalize groups with requisite resources for achievement of a more equitable society. At the heyday of the civil rights movement, the Marxists progressed from a fringe movement on campuses to a potent force that would emerge as the prevailing academic current in polite society for decades to come.

Similarly to the Jacobin radicals who subscribed to the doctrine of Rousseau’s General Will, the American Marxists promoted the interests of society over that of the individual. If one’s right to free expression had to be sacrificed to achieve that goal. Building on Thomas Paine’s conception of politics as applied metaphysics and Plato’s Philosopher King Thesis, the new left had little regard for de-centralization of power. The academic establishment was entrusted with the responsibility to determine which doctrines were conducive to the public good and which opposed it.

With the abominations of the Third Reich fresh in the memory of the European intellectuals who gained influence across college campuses, the relativist philosophical orientation became more pronounced. It was then politically incorrect to criticize any group other than white males. Borrowing from the Christian doctrine that sin originates in thought rather than action, the new left endeavored to purge the collective consciousness of racist, sexist, homophobic and ableist thoughts. Any step toward tolerance of free expression on behalf of those suspected of harboring such notions was seen as a slippery slope toward another genocide. Over decades, this ideological trajectory evolved into a modern conception of a micro-aggression where a person who engages in acts that could be construed as offensive to minorities commits genocide in his heart just as a Christian husband is deemed to commit adultery by entertaining erotic thoughts about another woman.

The culture of political correctness gave rise to the victim culture that directly incentivizes people to portray themselves as members of an oppressed group (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise-of-victimhood-culture/404794/). As the political correctness movement further gained momentum, the federal government expanded to accommodate the needs of marginalized groups. In so doing, it acquired the requisite political capital to reward businesses that complied with their agenda and punished their rivals who failed to do so. Nonetheless, government aid can only go so far in shaping the economic behavior of market entities. They may pay lip service to the government agenda, yet to maintain a certain level of productivity, they would be forced to recruit reasonably competent workers rather than beneficiaries of affirmative action. Regardless of how much lip-service businesses pay to the government’s unicorn dreams agenda, the fools will not inherit the earth.

Academic credentials putatively represent intellectual competence, yet grade inflation has been on the rise since the GI bill and this created a rift between what academic achievement enables one to achieve in the work-place and what it actually does. The wealth disparities between white males and the traditionally underprivileged minorities have widened not despite the increased access to education, but largely because of it. As academic standards continue to decline, university curricula become less abstract and more ideologically charged, students become less capable of making meaningful contributions to the economy. Their employers could not care less what they know about LGBT history, sexual harassment, corporate social responsibility or going green. A modicum of common-sense is more than sufficient to allow one to behave appropriately in a business environment and a dozen of classes on these topics will not make students more productive in the real world.

As the new left becomes even more entrenched in the polite society, these trends are likely to persist. Real wages will continue to stagnate, wealth disparities will widen further, the middle class will shrink and Pareto’s words will become prophetic. The self-proclaimed Philosopher Kings will wield a heavier influence over government policy, further stratifying class divisions under the banner of social justice. In response, the plebeians will compete for their status as members of an oppressed group, calling for the government to ameliorate their plights. In the words of Leon Trotsky, the traditional American values of entrepreneurship, self-reliance and individual achievement will be consigned to the garbage heap of history.  

The Self-esteem movement and college leftism

“The presidency is the incarnation of the American people, in a sacrament resembling that in which the water and the wine are seen to be the body of Christ.” -Herman Finer

In 1945, only 2 out of 10 people claimed that they were special or more talented than the average person. Today, 6 out of 10 people make a similar claim and the same holds true for 8 out of 10 college students. Over 50% of college students believe that they deserve a high-paying and a prestigious job immediately upon graduation. The overwhelming 70% of millennials think that they are of substantially above average intelligence and are capable of achieving great things in life. In nearly all surveys conducted on this matter, millennials were almost unanimous in their declaration that becoming famous is both possible and desirable for them

http://www.amazon.com/Narcissism-Epidemic-Living-Age-Entitlement/dp/1416575995/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1431048437&sr=8-1&keywords=Narcissism+epidemic

However, the reality of the job-market does not match their expectations. Recent publications of the Federal Reserve Bank study revealed that as few as 27% of college graduates work jobs that are related to their college degree and as few as 36% are employed in a line of work where a college degree is required. This should not be surprising as the recent study carried out by the Council for Aid in Education discovered that 40 percent of College seniors lack the critical thinking, analytical reasoning and communication skills necessary for professional success. Predictably, 58 percent of employers insisted that the system of education must undergo considerable improvements in order for new graduates to become competent contributors to the job market.

There is no job shortage in high skilled positions as employers of the IT industry continue to look for competent help. Despite their efforts to fill in these positions with immigrant labor-power, the demand for high-skilled labor remains very high. Although the low-skill jobs have been outsourced, America remains a bastion of technological innovation. The fields of medicine, mathematically advanced finance and engineering are lacking professionals who can stimulate the creative destruction of capitalism that American companies wish to capitalize on. Despite the shortage of competent labor-power in America, college students continue to hold rallies clamoring for the expansion of the social safety net to finance their fanciful self-indulgence.

The millennials are known for their cantankerous and rebellious attitudes. To be sure, if one was to bring a dozen of them in a room, they would hardly agree on a single political point. Indeed, one can scarcely expect anything different given their extraordinary powers of reason and the remarkably breadth of their general knowledge (http://randommeanderings123.blogspot.com/2014/09/modern-education-and-harlotry-of-minds.html). Yet, if there is one thing they agree on, it is that the government should be “on their side” rather than “off their backs”. Over sixty percent of millennials believe that a strong government is needed to handle “today’s complex economic problems” while only 46 percent of non-millennials subscribe to this viewpoint. Over 50% of millennials claim that the government should play an active role in solving society’s problems while only about 30% of non-millennials agree with that. Nearly half of millennials view the Federal government in a positive manner while only about a third of the rest of the citizenry share that sentiment. Similarly, 46 percent of millennials display confidence in the government’s ability to solve social problems while around 30 percent of older generations think likewise. Most fervently, millennials believe that the government should be more involved in education and should make college affordable (http://reason.com/blog/2014/05/20/survey-millennials-love-big-government).

Why are the millennials so devoted to the idea of the government becoming more involved in education? Are they blind to the fact that when the government floods student loans with federal money, college tuition goes up? (http://www.npr.org/2011/12/14/143718677/does-a-college-education-have-to-cost-so-much). Are they not aware that the enormous debt they have accumulated will never be paid off with the jobs they will likely acquire upon graduation? That only seems intuitive given the aforementioned statistics about the severe underemployment among college graduates most of whom work low-paying jobs that do not require a college degree. Are they incapable of understanding that when the federal government offers munificent financial aid to nearly all students who desire it, the demand for college education increases? Is the elementary law of supply and demand truly beyond their comprehension?

When the demand for any good or service increases, the price goes up and its provider becomes less accountable to the consumer. The law of diminishing marginal utility shows that the more of the same good one receives, the less valuable the good in question will become over time. Similarly to how these college students would concede that after having devoured enough sweats at their all night unsupervised cake party, they are likely to become less interested in eating more. Given that they scarcely have a concept of money, it is an exercise in futility to ask them if they would be less likely to pay a premium price for the fifth or sixth piece of cake than they did for the first one. Yet, if they could be forced to understand that after they have consumed the fifth piece of cake, they may not want to eat the sixth one, one just may hope that the following insight can dawn upon them.

If the government made it possible for almost anybody to obtain a college, does it not follow that universities can easily procure all of the customers they could need? In that case, does the law of diminishing marginal utility show that the university administrators will regard these students as less valuable? If students are regarded as less valuable, does it not follow that the universities will have less of an incentive to be sensitive to their needs? In that case, should it be surprising that college classrooms continue to balloon and they are now more likely to be taught by TAs than professors? Should it also be surprising that college students are hardly capable of writing a coherent paragraph, let alone think critically?

Remarkably, the majority of students are not dissatisfied with their university experience. Upon acquisition of their Bachelor’s degree, over 85% of students report being mostly satisfied or completely satisfied with their university experience. Such surveys have also shown that most students are more likely to admire pop-culture celebrities rather than scholars of stupendous intellect. If most students were asked if they would rather be more like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Albert Einstein, they would favor Arnold without hesitation. Given all of the obvious problems with the system of higher education, what value can colleges contribute to the lives of their students that is so great, that it outweighs all of their losses?

John Taylor Gatto proposed an answer to this question: provisional self-esteem. In their hearts, students do not believe that their academic success represents achievements to take pride in and they shouldn’t (http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Anniversary/dp/0865714487/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1431048517&sr=8-1&keywords=John+Taylor+Gatto). In 1998, grade A’s represent 43% of all letter grades, an increase of 28% since 1960 and 12% since 1988http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=16473). With the massive proliferation of online degree mills such as Strayer, Ashford, Kaplan, DeVry and University of Phoenix, it is evident that grade inflation increased by an even wider margin in the last two and a half decades. Additionally, this manifests in light of the fact that conventional four year schools are emulating the degree mill paradigm by offering more online classes and replacing tenured professor positions with callow TAs. At the very least, today’s average academic institution bears a much closer semblance to University of Phoenix than to a traditional University where nearly all intellectually gifted students coveted admission in the 40s and 50s.

Despite all of the praise educators lavish on students for mediocre work, it cannot emerge as the basis of their durable self-esteem (http://chronicle.com/article/On-Stupidity/45764). Aristotle claimed that in order to cultivate virtuous dispositions of character, one must act in a manner that displays such virtues. Over time, these virtues will become an essential part of their character. Clearly, formal education does not help students cultivate moral courage or intellectual ability, regardless of whether the average grade in class is an A- or an A. However, students are able to feel good about themselves on a short-term basis if they are repeatedly told how wonderful they are. That is what John Taylor Gatto refers to as “provisional self-esteem”. Even the least intelligent and the least inquisitive of students eventually begin catching on. Sooner or later, they realize that they have not accomplished much to deserve such praise.

To lull their self-critical judgment, educators must make them intellectually and emotionally dependent on positive feedback. They do so by indoctrinating pupils into an ideology that entirely divorces their identity from their achievements. In other words, students are to believe that they are wonderful, regardless of whether their actions truly deserve praise. For this reason, the academic class invented a litany of social justice “causes” that students can “contribute to” without doing anything of value. For example, recently Ithaca College Student government set up an online system where they could document “micro-aggressions” on campus. All students need to do is document which of their peers made remarks that could somehow be construed as offensive to a protected demographic group (http://theithacan.org/news/ic-sga-passes-bill-to-create-system-to-report-microaggressions/). Berkeley students recently held a rally clamoring for the creation of gender neutral restrooms on campus (http://www.breitbart.com/california/2015/04/21/poop-equality-students-hold-sht-in-at-public-california-university/). What purpose could this possibly be done for? Students need to feel that they are doing something important by acting in a way that does not involve “discrimination” against transsexuals. On a different occasion, Berkeley students voiced outrage that their philosophy class did not involve any readings from transgender authors (http://campusreform.org/?ID=6222).

It is not enough for campus officials to merely bolster the students’ self-esteem by allowing them to participate in meaningless political outcries that never solve real social problems. If students are constantly reminded that they are exceptionally compassionate, altruistic and tolerant, they will likely believe that they have a great heart. Yet, they cannot believe that they have a great head unless they also receive the best grades they could possibly want. It’s not enough for the average student to get an A or an A-, they should also be able to do it with ease. The mainstream media is saturated with messages about how wonderful, special and unique each youngster is, so they expect themselves to be remarkably gifted. As most narcissists do, college students expect to succeed without devoting any effort to the task at hand.

Perhaps with a smidgen of effort, an average student could do reasonably well in a dumbed down curriculum for a challenging subject such as history or philosophy, but that takes hard work and today’s college students do not like to work hard. For this reason, academic institutions created entire departments of academic disciplines entirely bereft of practical value or theoretical depth (http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/20-completely-ridiculous-college-courses-being-offered-at-u-s-universities). Examples of this include Queer Studies, Miscellaneous literature emphasizing Star Wars and even entire Departments devoted to the Feminist Critique of the Bible. Even Harvard was not above such low-brow gimmicks when they offered an entire class on anal sex (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/05/harvard-anal-sex-class_n_6102804.html).

Permissive parenting has become increasingly more common in American families. Children are now brought up to expect a great deal from the world without devoting much effort to earning what they demand from other people. By the time they become legal adults at the age of 18, the parents tend to push off their offspring to a surrogate parent of the Ivory Tower. That is why college students continue to demand boundless praise in the form of recognition for their “social conscience”. The callow youth justify such demands by participating in rallies that “raise awareness” about “important social problems” that they have no intention of solving. Upon returning to class, the campus protesters’ attitude hardly changes as they expect to be rewarded with the highest of grades that they have not earned.

One would hope that upon graduating from college, America’s youth are more than ready to begin acting like real adults. That is, they will look upon their university experience as a prolongation of adolescence and decisively leave their peccadilloes in the past where they belong. Not so, increasingly more young adults continue to live with their parents and blame Corporate America for their plights (http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/census-bureau-303-millennials-still-living-their-parents). In light of John Taylor Gatto’s “provisional self-esteem” thesis which shows that youngsters are now not only dependent on the incessant praise from teachers, but also on the ideology of gratuitous self-congratulation, one should not be surprised that they are incapable of questioning this patently implausible notion.

Once the millennials move out of their dorms and move in with their parents, they frantically search for their next surrogate parent in the work-place. Upon discovering that a modicum of common-sense, common decency and competency is a prerequisite for sustained employment, these children voice their contempt for the job-market not by refusing to perform well at their jobs, but by refusing to look for them in the first place (http://www.newarkadvocate.com/story/opinion/columnists/2015/03/28/despite-open-jobs-people-returning-work/70503848/). Today, over 93.5 million Americans are not participating in the work-force and nearly 16 percent of all people between the ages of 25 to 54 are no longer looking for a job. At least they found the surrogate parent in the government that is supposed to bankroll the children who never grow up.

These new college graduates expect little more than gratification of their puerile impulses. They have entered a covenant with the Federal government resembling that of Christians with God the Father. Just as God is the Almighty creator of the Universe, the government is the Almighty creator of all the good things in life. Despite their infantile remonstrations against the private sector, they are hardly capable of noticing the collusion between the Federal Government they romanticize and Big Business they inveigh. Presumably, when their favorite politician such as John Kerry or Al Gore leaves the board of directors of a transnational enterprise to join the Democratic Party, he undergoes a miraculous transformation. He somehow metamorphosizes from an opprobrious exploiter of the oppressed to their most ardent champion

Why the American education system is fraudulent

John Dewey famously argued that an educated populace is the backbone of a Democratic society. The school of thought he espoused has been known as “progressive education” which promoted egalitarianism, intellectual creativity and above all, a pro-Democratic mentality. Dewey stood fiercely opposed to the traditional paradigm of education where the pedagogue provided information and the students passively received it. For him, genuine learning must always take an active form where students are free to pursue intellectual inquiry in an autonomous fashion. In his own teaching, he encouraged students to ask difficult questions, challenge conventional wisdom and display creative initiative.

At a time when our institutions of higher learning seem divorced from these ideals, one cannot refrain from asking where we must have gone wrong. Dewey was a proud political progressive and many modern liberals regard him as iconic figure of their ideology.His credentials as a forward-looking intellectual and a champion of egalitarianism are impeccable. He was the only philosopher who was alive at a time when Bertrand Russell released his famous “History of Western Philosophy” and therein, Russell claimed that he was “almost sorry to have to disagree with Dewey” because of the profound respect he had for the man.

Russell’s panegyric was hardly an idiosyncratic sentiment of a marginalized radical. Today, academic institutions from the K-12 to Ivy League graduate schools are dominated by politically liberals who heartily endorse the tenets of Dewey’s social philosophy.

Throughout his writings on the matter, he repeatedly professed his devotion to two ideals that he saw as intimately intertwined: education and democracy. The connection between the two has been so fundamentally ingrained into our collective consciousness that we can hardly see them as distinct from each other. Based on this assumption, we often surmise that the more education the average person receives, the better! The more college degrees our institutions award, the brighter our citizenry must be and the more capable they must be of thinking critically. Therefore, it should stand to reason that our society must be becoming increasingly more democratic. However, even the most elementary comparison of the modern era with the progressive Era in which Dewey lived suggests that any notion of a substantive democratic progress must be illusory.

In over 94% of Presidential Elections, the Candidate who raises the most money wins (http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Rule-Investment-Competition-Money-Driven/dp/0226243176/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429972254&sr=8-1&keywords=Investment+theory+of+politics). This is even more of a stark reality today than it was a 100 years ago when voters were less influenced by the mainstream media. Highlighting that observation, Paul Lazarsfeld authored a provocative paper titled “the election is over” urging politicians to not waste their money on persuading voters to change their mind. At the time, it seemed virtually self-explanatory that the inner-city unionized blue-collar workers would invariably vote Democrat and the rural religious conservatives would vote Republican. Anyone who publicly contemplated changing their political allegiance risked becoming a pariah in the most ignominious manner conceivable.

While very few voters understood the philosophical underpinnings of their political allegiances, they were able to provide a clear account of what their party stood for. They did not need to rely on sentimentalized ideals and vague abstractions. Clearly, that is no longer the case today when a significant percentage of millennials profess commitment to socialism and a free-market economy (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/millennials-economics-voting-clueless-kids-these-days/374427/). Similarly, they are in favor of additional government services as long as their taxes do not increase “too much”. When asked to define a liberal, they resort to broad generalization such as “somebody who doesn’t discriminate against anyone”, “someone who does not look down upon others”, and “somebody who wants progress”. Similarly, they describe a conservative as someone who “does not care about the poor”, “does not want to help others” and “is merely concerned with the rich” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xz_CKpQeJY).

Not only are these students not capable of providing a coherent and a comprehensive account of their ideology, they appear to be total ignoramuses when it comes to elementary facts of American history (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRZZpk_9k8E). An African-American student answered that the Confederates won the Civil War, a Sports Management major did not know who serves as the Vice-President today and a psychology major did not who we gained our independence from (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2fHQ9eULzk). What they did know was who Brad Pitt is married to and that conservatives only want to oppress the poor. What can explain such a massive disconnect between what politicians want us to expect from our system of education and what it actually delivers? The answer to that question is simple: the system of education was not designed to live up to any of these ideals.

It wasn’t John Dewey but Horace Mann who laid down the foundation for the modern system of education. The Massachusetts senator was deeply troubled by the cultural implications of the Industrial Revolution. As he witnessed the liberating potential of capitalism and the flourish of individualism that came with it, he called for drastic measures to address this problem with. Contemporaneously, Prussia was recovering from a heavy defeat at the hands Napoleon which the military leaders attributed to a lack of discipline in the ranks. Therefore, the nobility attempted a profound transformation of the nation’s collective consciousness by coercing the public to cultivate a distinctive set of values including unconditional obedience to authority, conformity and orderliness. These were the pivotal values on which Horance Mann’s system of education was founded.

In light of this premise, it should not be surprising that our college campuses have degenerated into cesspools of mediocrity and vulgarity that routinely churn out morally and intellectually deficient human beings. It is also not an accident of history that the demand for higher education increased at the apex of the Civil Rights movement. Similarly to how Otto Von Bismarck founded the welfare state to cool the revolutionary ardor of the peasantry, Horace Mann founded the system of education when the liberating potential of the Industrial Revolution proved too much for the elites to bear. When the Civil Rights movement appeared to be getting out of hand, the ruling class have once again called upon the system of education to stage a resurgence of the Americanization of Prussian values. In so doing, they have not empowered the student-body to become enlightened actors in a democracy but created a multitudinous chattel pliable for political manipulation and vulnerable to economic exploitation.

The Flip-side of Economic Inequality

Robert Reich provides a detailed account of how wealth disparities have widened since Ronald Reagan took office. However, he neglects to mention a single fact about the economic malaise that plagued his predecessor, Jimmy Carter. Economic trends do not emerge over one or two presidential terms and a single Presidential Administration does not have the power to fundamentally widen or bridge the income gaps. He also credits the Eisenhonwer Administration with diminishing the wealth gaps without addressing any connection between their policies and the Structural Crisis that emerged during the Carter Administration.

The Great Recession that we are in has been caused by a concatenation of events spanning for multiple decades. FDR's NIRA may have provided jobs for certain government cronies, but they have actually prolonged the Great Depression because the costs of obeying regulations disproportionately affected small businesses. Large companies that are well-connected with the government can more easily absorb these costs and even negotiate the enactment of policies that lessen the severity of the regulatory burden. However, what merely impedes the growth of big-time government cronies can bankrupt smaller enterprises. That is one reason why NIRA is widely recognized as a failure. With varying degrees of applicability, the same can be said about many other programs of the New Deal because they were founded on similar principles: forcing companies to act more responsibly by imposing regulations upon them that the elite and well-connected enterprises can manipulate to their own advantage.

What Reich has not mentioned about the Eisenhower Administration is that it continued governing in the same fashion. How would he like to tell his liberal friends that the top bracket was taxed at 91%? Would Professor Reich's students still support him politically if he revealed that fact about the Presidential Administration he idolizes? Would this eminent "public intellectual" dare to even begin speculating about the causes of the Structural Crisis of the 1970s? I am sincerely curious how he would go about blaming the Republicans for that debacle because none of the Presidents between the New Deal and Carter endorsed any economic doctrines that even superficially resemble the economic principles of the contemporary Republican Party.

To his credit, Reich was correct that the wealth disparities have widened since Reagan. Yet, what he overlooked was that this outcome was a trade-off for more severe economic plights that plagued the nation. Under Carter, inflation and unemployment were both in the double-digits and keeping the highest tax brackets at over 70% did not help matters. The American citizenry spoke loudly and clearly in the 1980 Presidential Elections where Reagan claimed 44 out of 50 states. I can imagine that Reich would remonstrate that Reagan deceived the general public about his policies regarding wealth inequalities, but that leaves one to wonder why he was re-elected carrying 49 out of 50 states.

Reich is not your typical naive liberal that you'd find among the Occupy Wall-Street movements. He is well aware that despite the income inequalities that the Reagan administration commenced and perpetuated, it solved a broad range of economic problems that have been unheard of for decades. There is nothing that could be said about his decision to suppress these facts other than that he was intellectually dishonest.