Category: Education and Finances

The decline of the academies is certainly not exaggerated. Today, aside from being saturated with Neo-Marxist diarrhoea and irksome nihilism, the world of academia has seen an ever-widening gulf appear between tutor and student. Since the 1960’s, universities across the Western world have become similar to pre-revolutionary France, with faculty acting like the pampered aristocrats of Versailles and the average student a lowly peasant, with instead of the yoke of eternal serfdom around his neck, the yoke of student debt.

Perhaps a better comparison would be with Communist Russia, the Politburo and the proletariat, let’s face it, most academics are Socialists, Maoists or some other kind of ideology. The way the academy has restructured itself over the past 40 to 50 years, coupled with increased university tuition fees, has created a seismic gap between those who attend a university with the hope of furthering their skills and obtaining a flourishing career at the end of it, and those who see a university as a giant cash cow.

The Not So Honourable System

Whereas the academies were once a place that valued classical education and thus attracted curious and intellectual minds, who understood the great works of the masters, like Plato, Aristotle et al, it now attracts the soulless careerist. Men and women who perpetuate flimsy ideologies, the red flag waving revolutionaries, unless it’s anything to do with their paymasters, then they’re the most well behaved little boys and girls.

As standards surrounding higher education have dropped so dramatically over the decades, we’ve seen the increase in Postmodernism, which is now the cast iron and unquestionable doctrine of every university across the Western world. In the words of Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology at Toronto University, Canada, Postmodernism is so popular because it makes stupid people feel intellectual, without having to do any of the hard work.

A House Built on Sand

One of the most egregious aspects of the modern university and one which is cheating gullible students out of a ton of money and an actual career is the teaching of pointless subjects. Another leftover from the baby boomers temper tantrum against their parents, subjects like gender studies, formerly women’s studies, have gained a prominent place at universities, proving the theory that we are becoming ever more an idiocracy.

Gender studies are Postmodernism in its purest form, a flimsy mish-mash of nonsensical drivel coupled with a victimhood mentality. Often taught by hairy, man-hating “professors” (and I use the word professors in the loosest possible term) who indoctrinate the blank canvas like minds of young girls in misandry and viewing femininity as a weapon conceived by the mythical “patriarchy”.

It is not just the rise of purposeless courses, but traditional subjects, specifically those in the arts and humanities, have become completely dismantled and reshaped to fit with Postmodernist teaching methods. Art history and English Literature, for example, are now so far removed from what they once were in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, they are now mere shells of their former selves.

Great works of literature by Shakespeare and Wordsworth and art by Michelangelo and Bernini are now observed through the prism of identity politics, the male gaze and so-called anti-racism. Everything is dismantled and taught to be patriarchal, sexist, homophobic and racist, so we have graduates being churned out year-by-year who have little understanding of what a novel or a painting actually is. Culture is merely the byproduct of an oppressive system that keeps down the poor little minorities.

End Game

None of this would have happened if the academies stuck to their core principles, those which were laid out by the ancient Greek philosophers. Secondly, the downgrading of admissions for tutors and professors, combined with government interference in tuition fee increases etc, has created a noxious atmosphere, which has given rise to a pampered yet intellectually redundant elite.

The end game of contemporary higher education is clear, to perpetuate a very dangerous deconstructivist ideology, which keeps an elite secure and the rest of the university going population ignorant and deep in debt.

What do we expect from the institutes?

Welcome to this second-part in this two-part blog on ‘is college worth it?’

So what do we mean when talking about education more fun and interesting? Well, let us take a practical example. The two main criticisms of university put out by various commentators is:

1) Of a time cost – the amount of time you spent in University. Some say it is too long.

2) Its financial cost – it costs too much. Many students are graduating with tens of thousands in debt these days.

What policy really helps us really explore and can help us touch upon education outside of the institutions that we have already built. What do I mean by that?

This is a more detailed practical example. Let us say hypothetically, we have to learn about education policy and let’s say a charming young man puts a little video online about education policy and I watched it. You can reach it with the internet connection from your home for virtually free whereas a University lecturer will take place with an old man at the front of the lecture room with a rather large salary and even larger building.
Another example of this kind of this poor thinking policy is in terms of time…

Okay, so we are all grouped by age in the university or school system, but why? For example, let’s say, you were really strong in history (or some other subject which was your favourite) when you were young, say, twelve, but you still had to sit with a bunch of idiot twelve year olds who knew nothing about history. How is that efficient to your learning or their learning?

So to sum up our points!

When we ask the question “Is the University worth it?” we are essentially asking the wrong question. You get two points down in this social and economic cost and benefits of this degree versus that degree, and it is just not productive to the debate. Without question, mass education for all has been nothing but a benefit for the entirety of mankind. The question we should be asking ourselves is how can we get this great experience of learning stuff regardless of what it is, whether it is sociology or chemical engineering, how can we get it so everyone can share that experience to the lowest social and economic cost we can manage?
Thank you for reading.

If you are confused by anything we said because we it was quite an incoherent piece then please feel free to post your comments below and we will try to answer. If you are interested in education policy like in a broader sense, then you’ll have to ask those questions as well. Thanks for reading again.

Hello, interested happy people and The Uni Tutor’s blog readers!

In this two-part blog entry, we are going to discuss the importance (or unimportance) of University (College, as you North Americans call it).

Now, there seems to have been a lot of discussion lately about the importance of University. Is University worth it? Most of the discussion seems to stem from a result of the ever-increasing university fees, both in the UK and the USA. To make matters worse, the ever shrinking job market is playing a role in the increasing doubts over the usefulness of a college (or university) degree.
We’re more than certain that this controversial topic will raise a few eyebrows. That said, however, we are going to ensure we cover a wide variety of viewpoints.

But what we think many commentators are lacking in their critiques is that don’t get the objective of university from a policy perspective.

So that is what we are going to do discuss because the internet loves policy, right?

I think first what we should cover before we get into the details of whether university is worthy or not, is exactly what we expect education institutions to do.

So firstly, I think it is important that education teaches us to be better people. Whether you like it or not, learning is something we do to better understand the people and the world around us, to understand our place in the universe. I am not sure whether you are studying physics or philosophy you are answering a fundamental question, do you? ‘Why I am here, where is my place?’

We have asked people of who have that sort of education about where they stand in the wider world, the more reasons to be socially conscious with their actions and politically active. And these traits, we are sure you can agree, is important in society. And secondly, what I think we can agree with importantly is that education is designed to prepare you to be useful to the economic system that we have (voluntarily or involuntarily) embraced. So you want to start. To do that, you have to participate in market economics. You have to get a job, you have to be useful. And education is supposedly and should be designed to help you be a part of that. So we study something that we enjoyed. Hopefully we got a job that we enjoy so we can enjoy life and have stuff and everything will be great.

A good example of this kind of thinking is in Germany. Germany does not consider education spending to be part of a social policy spending programme. They consider it to be part of an economic spending program. This is because an educated workforce is the best economic asset a country can have. So the trait goes that the more educated we are the more socially active we are, the more political active we are and the more economically affluent and responsible we are, right? So how is this linking on what they are talking about across the globe about the worth of university degree? Well, if we agree on what Universities and indeed the education system as a whole is for, which is to make people more useful economically and socially, which I think we can agree on to a greater or lesser extent.

So if we can agree on that, the question for us as informed policy makers becomes, how do we make education worth it? In our next series in this two-part blog, we will be talking about how can we make it more efficient? Because if we can agree on that then as an informed policy-makers the questions becomes less of how can we make University worth it? In other words, how can we increase the economic and social benefits of it? Two, how can we make universities less boring and more fun and useful? Put another way, how can we decrease the economic and social cost?

We hope you enjoyed this first series in our blog. Please join us in the next series when we further elaborate on the issues and reach several important conclusions.

Brendan Davids