Website owner: James Miller
The college experience
I just read an article in The Atlantic titled “America will sacrifice anything for the college experience”. We are in the middle of the world-wide Covid pandemic and most colleges have discontinued classroom instruction and are teaching via distance learning systems. This article is making a point that when a student studies through distance learning he is getting short-changed because he is not getting “the real college experience”. The article claims the most important part of a college education is not the book learning but all of partying, drinking, etc. that are part of the college experience.
I first want to say that I attended an engineering college in which the students were around 98% male. There were almost no girls there. I didn’t go to that college for some social experience. I went there for one reason and one reason only: to get an education in the technical fields I was interested in (mathematics and physics). I was a religious person who didn’t drink, smoke, or use bad language. I wasn’t a person with any interest in fraternities, socializing, or partying. My interest in college was not for some social experience. It was for a degree. As a Bible believing Christian I distrusted “the crowd”. That fact has always made me a loner. The following four paragraphs in this article that caught my attention (the highlighting is mine):
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Parents and students are miffed because they don’t really buy teaching when they pay tuition. Instead, they get something more abstract: the college experience. Some of that experience involves education—the seminar discussion in a facsimile of a medieval monastery, the cram session under the vaulted ceiling of a library, the brisk, after-class chat with a professor across a grassy quad. But most of it doesn’t, especially the stuff that can’t be done from a distance, such as moving away from home for the first time, swilling booze at a house party, touring houses during sorority rush, applying face paint for a football game, decorating the cold, cinder-block walls of a new dorm room.
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Without the college experience, a college education alone seems insufficient. Quietly, higher education was always an excuse to justify the college lifestyle. But the pandemic has revealed that university life is far more embedded in the American idea than anyone thought. America is deeply committed to the dream of attending college. It’s far less interested in the education for which students supposedly attend.
Students do go to school for the schooling, of course. Colleges hold classes, host majors, and award degrees. Getting a college degree is now one of the only paths to a middle-class life, training graduates for a particular career and, on average, doubling their median income. But that’s just a small part of colleges’ purpose. In the United States, higher education offers a fantasy for how kids should grow up: by competing for admission to a rarefied place, which erects a safe cocoon that facilitates debauchery and self-discovery, out of which an adult emerges. The process—not just the result, a degree—offers access to opportunity, camaraderie, and even matrimony. Partying, drinking, sex, clubs, fraternities: These rites of passage became an American birthright.
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It might seem ludicrous to sacrifice public health to preserve indiscretion as an ideal of college life, but that life has never aspired toward well-being in the first place. It’s a deliberate feature of college, not a side effect. “Youthful indiscretions were tolerated and even encouraged as part of the process of upward social mobility that the college facilitated,” Thelin writes.
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I first point out that the graduates from our Ivy League universities and other top tier universities are the people who populate the top positions in government, industry, military, religion, politics, etc. in American society. They are the people with the power and influence in America. As we have just read above, universities do more than just instruct in some speciality or field. They shape and mold people, mold their characters. They create patterns of habit, outlook, and attitude. Those loners who don’t conform to the depravity of the system probably get screened out — eliminated. Partying, drinking, sex. I suspect that these three are the most fundamental parts of the university education. That does sound like moral debauchery to me. And all of these graduates from these top universities are forming the top tiers of American society. They and all of their associates and like-minded friends. It is like a big clique. They have the power. What is wrong with America? Perhaps all of this gives some insight. Let me quote from Aristotle:
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” Aristotle
Well, our universities are indeed educating the heart. But that education that it is providing does not sound like it comes from God or the Bible. It is definitely not Christian. It is the education of Satan. It is the education of “the crowd”. And those who don’t follow the crowd are ostracized. It sounds like it would be a very hostile environment for a Christian (a true Christian). As the above paragraphs say, the most important part of the university education is not the education part, but rather the “college experience” part. These elite-set young people become well educated in a lifestyle of drinking, drugs, partying, and fornication.
The phrase “which erects a safe cocoon that facilitates debauchery and self-discovery, out of which an adult emerges.” says it all. Debauchery. That is a good descriptive word. That is the kind of education we need! That is the way to form the character of a mature, well-adjusted adult!
Def. Debauchery. Extreme indulgence in bodily pleasures and especially sexual pleasures : behavior involving sex, drugs, alcohol, etc. that is often considered immoral … he was glad when others joined them, men and women; and they had more drink and spent the night in wild rioting and debauchery.
Do I exaggerate when I say America is corrupt? Debauchery doesn’t come alone. It is always accompanied by companions. Like lying, cheating, high dishonesty, high moral corruption. This is the pool of people from which the lawyers, judges, teachers, professors, politicians, newspaper reporters, business leaders, etc. of America come. This explains how a baker can be fined $135,000 for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple.
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