In the not-too-distant past, there was a common perception of a young person’s transition from high school graduation to higher education. The newly liberated ex-high-schooler was believed to leave 12th grade with an excessively limbic, subcortical operating system dominated by raging hormones and rebellious mindsets. Then, learned implacably rational professors performed pedagogical brain interventions that stimulated the prefrontal cortex such that it eventually surged into prominence, resulting in higher education graduates who could and did employ independent rationality to reach critical life decisions.
Given the current 21st century state of higher education, however, I have transformed my higher education neurology-brain metaphor to an gastrological-alimentary one. Contemporary higher education students are not stimulated to frontal lobe engagement by their universities. Rather, the hapless victims are consumed by universities that extract student intellectual nutritive resources, and infuse their depleted heads with boluses of manipulative propaganda. Too often, the universities' strive to produce students who eagerly, willingly excrete retained propaganda residua, thereby fertilizing extant American mindlessness to further the goals of elitists, so-called intellectuals, business tycoons, and popular social influencers who control higher education.
Young people are not being encouraged how to think, but coerced into what to think and when. Even more destructive is how viciously and relentlessly the few brave student propaganda-orthodoxy-resistors are attacked and demoralized.
As George Orwell asserted, "Freedom is the freedom to say 2 plus 2 makes four. If that is granted, all else follows." Given that I'm an old man, young people reading this blog posting might have more confidence in Chat GPT's interpretation of the Orwell quote than mine. Accordingly, the "great and powerful" artificial intelligence sage reports "George Orwell's phrase 'Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4' comes from his dystopian novel 1984. This statement encapsulates a fundamental idea about the nature of truth and the importance of intellectual freedom ...Orwell's statement highlights the importance of protecting intellectual freedom and the right to speak one's mind. It underscores that without the ability to acknowledge reality, all other forms of freedom become meaningless. The phrase serves as a warning against the dangers of authoritarianism and the erosion of objective truth."
Let’s see how the non-partisan organization FIRE | Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression rates the intellectual and free-speech integrity of some elite universities that purport to educate our students.
So, we see that many elite university students are taught "proper" identity-oriented thoughts in compliance with professor-curated identity dogma as the first, primary, and often, sole sieve through which all information must flow and be evaluated for righteousness. Moreover, the sieved information then is gospel, not to be tested, but to be unquestioningly implemented in daily life.
American elitists and intellectuals relentlessly chant the mantra, "Our diversity is our strength" to shame anyone who makes comments that they define as socially non-inclusive or derogatory. Those same elitists and intellectuals, however, unceasingly try to impose their Orwellian control over any of our contrary thoughts, speech, and actions. To them, diverse thoughts, speech, and actions are evil and must be eradicated.
Finally, I am well aware that most people reading this blog probably are far beyond college graduation age and many have no college-age loved ones. However, because you and I are being inundated daily by misinformation messages across all media platforms, I hope you will consider how to assess questions and answers in a manner that I describe in my Questioning & Answering (2023) book, a very small example of which is:
QUESTION
Message | Relationship |
Credibly Generated by Questioner | Comprehensible to Question Receiver |
Well-Intentioned by Questioner | Well-Received by Question Receiver |
ANSWER
Message | Relationship |
Credibly Generated by Answerer | Comprehensible to Answer Receiver |
Well-Intentioned by Answerer | Well-Received by Answer Receiver |
References
McCusker, Peter J. (2023) Questioning & Answering: How, Who, When, & Where. Seattle, Washington: Amazon Publishing
NEW: 2024 College Free Speech Rankings show alarming 81% success rate of deplatforming attempts at nation’s most censorial schools
https://www.thefire.org/news/new-2024-college-free-speech-rankings-show-alarming-81-success-rate-deplatforming-attemptshttps://www.thefire.org/research-learn/2024-college-free-speech-rankings
