On Education: The fall of Conscription and the Rise of Soccer Moms

Colleges are maximum profit diploma mills in the service of Soccer Moms where competition is a bad word and everyone gets a prize. Education is expensive and as such, the customer is always right. Students have the right to anonymously evaluate teachers who are not much different from salespeople working on commission; conviviality counts. Faculty who insist on rigor will be fired or ostracized by colleges on the advice of their lawyers, fearful of litigious parents who want what they paid for or their money back. After all, other businesses offer refunds.

The race has gone to the hare. Straw pig has nothing to fear. Now it’s OK for men to cry like babies and lying is spin, not sin. Wall Street brokers steal billions and then give themselves bonuses from the coffers of the taxpayers and yet we cannot afford to fund art or philosophy in the public schools. Art is the key to critical thinking and philosophy facilitates complex reasoning. Reading, writing and elocution are on life support, rendered chronic invalids by the shortcuts employed on the digital social media.

According to Foucault, information is power and one would think that with all this information at our fingertips American students would be the most powerful ever. It’s ironic that the reverse seems to be the case. Inquisitiveness to look outward has turned to an indifference to anything outside of one’s immediate needs. Young people have been brought up with the doctrine that sharing is un-American. I miss the draft and the sense of social responsibility that went with it.