The perspicacious Peter Wood asks how our system of higher education has formed students' character, and his response is not for the faint of heart:
So is the character of students shaped by our system of higher education best summarized as conformist? To a large extent, yes. The progressive left is counting on a vast, quiescent consensus among the college-educated, a consensus sufficient to end the culture wars and usher in a reign of one-sided agreement on all important issues. The left’s near total domination of education at all levels, including colleges and universities, has given it ample opportunity to instill its basic values. These include a settled hatred of Western civilization, an elevation of identity groups and corresponding devaluation of common humanity, and a preference for the homogeneous group over the free-spirited individual.
Along with the conformity comes a warmth-seeking, affirmation-thirsty need for the therapeutic. College graduates today have been used to a life of self-esteem-enhancing bromides. They seldom see difficulty as valuable in its own right. Grandstanding comes more easily to these folks than doing; and accomplishment without an audience is almost unthinkable.
The character that contemporary American education seems most to foster is also a person unmoored to any abiding sense of reality. He or she is ambitious, dissatisfied, and vaguely angry. College has made it a settled fact that America is a profoundly unfair society, but that the “structural inequalities” run so deep that there is little that can be done about them. This allows the alternatives of resentful passivity or frenetic pursuit of symbolic protests and acts of atonement. Often you see both in the same person. Lethargically pessimistic one day, stridently assertive the next.
If character is destiny — and Wood's analysis on the mark — can the end of America as we've known and cherished it be far behind?
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