The question of a college education is on the block, as in: “is it worth it?” And: “what’s the point?”
I think that first, we should decide what an education is for, and I think that the Number One Job of education is to educate the kiddies in the Regime Narrative.
But notice that this is only useful in a specific sense for the youngsters selected to become regime priests. For the peasants it is only necessary in a general way that they know nothing other than Regime Narrative. Thus, it is the job of today’s college that woke priests know the inside and outside of spewing out talk about equity and oppressed peoples and “harmful” and “lived experience” while ordinary kids just need to know that they will get brownie points for joining in a regime sponsored protest, and will have their lives ruined if they dare to question anything.
Thus, for ordinary kids, what’s the point of college if they can get employment credentials outside the gubmint education system? And what’s the point of a six-figure college debt? That’s the truth indirectly understood by the Biden college debt forgiveness plan.
And what’s the point for the regime to spend all that money on colleges when all that’s necessary is that the Woke priests teach the peasants not to question the Narrative
Thus, a piece at Quillette titled “After College.” It waffles around for a while realizing that kids like college for the parties and general goofing around: “the experience.” Then there all the “social expectations, family dynamics… [and the] veneer of socially acceptable rationalizations.”
In other words, kids go to college because it is there.
But the government wants kids at college so it can stuff the upper classes with the Regime Narrative. That’s what Oxford and Cambridge were all about. How much college do you need? Especially if you have read Peter Turchin and his warnings about the “overproduction of elites.”
Back in the day they made sure that dissenters couldn’t go to college.
If you were a Dissenter from the Church of England, you couldn’t go to Oxbridge, because the Toleration Acts, so Dissenters and Puritans had to educate their own leaders. The Puritans couldn’t take it any more and came to North America where they could set up their own universities thanks to Puritan clergyman John Harvard in 1636 and James Pierpont at Yale in 1701.
Then the Germans reinvented the university in the early 19th century not as a religious and philosophical enterprise to educate priests and the elite but as research universities to produce science. And that seemed to be the model until the invention of Woke.
I think it is important to grasp the importance of literacy. The Jews have been literate since whenever, but western Europeans really only since the Gutenberg press in the 1430s. It was Gutenberg that prompted the Reformation and growing literacy that powered the Enlightenment.
Really, what were the feudal lords thinking? The rise in literacy led to the rise of the educated class and the end of feudalism.
And clearly the political power of the educated elite has been centered on their domination of education.
Thus, whoever controls what the kiddies are taught controls the world.
But suppose that the Internet has changed the rules on education and Narrative? Back in the day, according to Ron Unz, the ruling class could disappear dissenting journalists like John T. Flynn and William Henry Chamberlin. Now, not so much. Maybe thats why the rulers had to go woke and publicly accuse dissenters of “disinformation” and “hate.”
Maybe the current communications revolution has changed the rules on ruling-class Narrative and all the wokey nonsense is not the implacable end of freedom but a new world order struggling to be born.
Hey, who needs gubmint schools; who needs gubmint universities; who needs Government Disinformation Agencies? We got the Internet.
Because if parents stop sending their kids to government schools, and decide to skip university, and succeed in dodging the censors.
Well, if we were the Deep State I would call the FBI to put a stop to it.