Many parents worry about the impact of college on their children’s core values. James Lileks addresses that concern in his latest “Athwart” column for National Review:
As for upending the Etch A Sketch of a freshman’s belief system, parents are right to worry. Oh, the school looks like a place of gravity and tradition, what with the ivy and colonnades and Latin engraved over the doors, but parents fear that after they leave, it’s a Mazola midnight orgy on the commons with a huge picture of Che projected Bat-signal-style in the sky. To which the educators will scoff and say that’s troglodyte paranoia, and besides, Mazola might use genetically modified corn to make its oil, and that’s not sustainable.
There’s no plan, no plot. The faculty doesn’t meet to divvy up brainwashing duty: “All right, Blythe-Smidgens, you use lit courses to elevate the proletariat to its rightful role as the vanguard of revolutionary change, and Parsons here will use biology to strip the fetus of its personhood.” Like the liberalism of newsrooms, it’s just in the air. Problem is, you have to breathe. If the teacher asks the student to describe Gatsby in terms of the Occupy movement, the kid won’t say, “That’s a specious application of faddish politics to great literature,” because a) he’ll flunk or b) those are hard words! We never had to use them in high school! The latter point is often used as a reason for sending everyone into the dark satanic diploma mills — college does the job that secondary schools used to. The high school history final used to be “Explain the rise and fall of the Greek city-state, and Italy’s achievement of unitary peninsular political cohesion.” Now it’s “Which president would you like to hang out with?”
