Monday, October 18, 2010

Should You Bother Going to University?

Peter Hitchens, in his most recent Daily Mail column asks: "Is university really such a good thing? I spent three years learning to be a Trot."

What are universities for anyway? I went to one and spent the whole time being a Trotsky­ist troublemaker at the taxpayers’ expense, completely neglecting my course. I have learned a thousand times more during my 30-year remed­ial course in the University of Fleet Street, still under way.

I am still ashamed of the way I lived off the taxes of millions of people who would have loved three years free from the demands of work, to think and to learn, but never had the chance.

We seem to accept without question that it is a good thing that the young should go through this dubious experience. Worse, employers seem to have fallen completely for the idea that a university degree is essential – when it is often a handicap.

For many people, college is a corrupting, demoralising experience. They imagine they are independent when they are in fact parasites, living off their parents or off others and these days often doomed to return home with a sense of grievance and no job. They also become used to being in debt – a state that previous generations rightly regarded with horror and fear.

And they pass through the nasty, sordid rite of passage known as ‘Freshers’ Week’, in which they are encouraged to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol and to lose what’s left of their sexual inhibitions after the creepy sex educators have got at them at school. If they have learned self-disciplined habits of work and life, they are under pressure to forget all about them, suddenly left alone in a world almost completely stripped of authority.

And if they are being taught an arts subject, they will find that their courses are crammed with anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-traditional material. Proper literature is despised and ‘deconstructed’. Our enviable national history is likewise questioned, though nothing good is put in its place.

Even if they are study­ing something serious, their whole lives will be dominated by assumptions of political correctness, down to notices in the bars warning against ‘homophobia’ and other thought crimes.

I think this debauching of the minds and bodies of the young is more or less deliberate. The horrible liberal Woodrow Wilson, who eventually became President of the United States, was originally an academic who once blurted out the truth as seen by many such people. He said in a rare moment of candour: ‘Our aim is to turn out young men as unlike their fathers as possible.’

Read it all here.

Ever since Progressivism took control of most Western universities during the last part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, universities have been in decline. The hard sciences have pretty much been able to erect a fire wall behind which they have gone about their business without being bothered too much - as long as they profess undying faith in the Darwinist Creed so beloved of the Left.

But the Humanities and the Social Sciences are a different matter altogether and the ethos of the university as a whole is shaped by the politically correctness that is the result of cultural Marxism and the embrace of the sexual revolution. Universities in the West (which invented the university) are in decline and have become finishing schools for the Progressive Ruling Class.

So should Christians have anything to do with them? Well, not if you are going there to be educated; you won't be educated but rather indoctrinated into Progressivism. But Christians should infiltrate universities and wage endless war against the usurpers who have seized control. They should be harassed, debated, mocked and opposed at all times and defeated when it occasionally becomes possible. In the long term, if our culture is to be saved the universities will have to be reformed and won back to Christianity.

Part of the reform effort is the creation of alternative, conservative universities by Christians that can serve as models of what we want for all universities. This effort is not a withdrawal from the goal of university reform but an essential component of it.

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