OBSERVATIONS ON ACADEMICS AND SCHOOLING
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"If education provides anything, it should be an ability to think --
that is, to weigh one idea against an opposing idea, and to use evidence
and logic to try to determine what is true and what is false. That is precisely
what our schools and colleges are failing to teach today." -- Thomas
Sowell
"The public school system is already so beleaguered by bureaucracy;
so cowed by the demands of due process; so overwhelmed with faddish curricula
that its educational purpose is almost an afterthought." -- Janice Rogers
Brown
"Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow
and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from
within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to
create and maintain." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"In 1940, teachers were asked what they regarded as the three major
problems in American schools. They identified the three major problems
as: Littering, noise, and chewing gum. Teachers last year were asked what
the three major problems in American schools were, and they defined them
as: Rape, assault, and suicide." -- William Bennett, 1993
"An elite university is like a kibbutz hooked up to an ATM. It is the
closest thing we may ever find to a socialist enterprise that endures."
-- Andrew
Samwick
"Academia is virtually a liberal monopoly but they show no misgivings
about the lack of diversity of ideas on campus. It is only physical diversity
that arouses the passions of liberals because that engages their attitudes
toward particular social groups." -- Thomas
Sowell
"The more profound problem, however, is the degree
to which many academic intellectuals, especially in the humanities, have
lost their ability to distinguish the 'state' from 'society'." -- "Assumptions
of Power" by Stephen Cox, Reason
magazine,
March, 1993
"I'd rather entrust the government of the United
States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory
than to the faculty of Harvard University." -- William F. Buckley, Jr.
"In his latest book, Revolutionary
Wealth, co-written with his wife Heidi, [futurist Alvin] Toffler
diagrams the varying speeds in which institutions change. In one chapter,
the couple uses a series of figurative cars on the freeway to make their
point. Zooming along at 100 MPH 'is a car representing the fastest-changing
major institution in America today -- the company or business,' the Tofflers
write. By contrast, a car driven by government and regulatory agencies
would be puttering at a speed of 25 MPH. Meanwhile, bringing up the rear,
at 10 miles per hour, shuddering along 'with a flat tire and steam coming
out its radiator' is the American school system. 'Is it possible that it
costs $400 billion to maintain this broken heap? The answer is yes, every
year'." -- Edward
B. Driscoll Jr.
"The degree of vapidity of belief is often greater
with academics. As Orwell observed, there are some ideas so stupid that
only intellectuals can believe them." -- Gary
Jason
"The belief that all wealth comes from stealing
is popular in prisons and at Harvard." -- George Gilder
A university professor comments on the perpetual
mid-life crisis of some of his colleagues here.
"There are fewer places where you are more likely
to run into lunatics than on a college faculty." -- John Dobbins
"Some dedicated people with intelligence may suffer through ed school
in order to teach, but many others will decide that they have better things
to do than listen to the pretentious garbage presented to students under
the guise of teacher training." -- Dr.
Thomas Sowell
"When we go to our doctors' offices we don't expect
to see signs on their office doors making political statements attacking
the war in Iraq or attacking those who oppose it. That's because doctors
are professionals and have taken an oath to minister to all their patients
regardless of their political beliefs. Why can't we expect the same professionalism
and decency from our professors?" -- David
Horowitz
"Over the last 20 years or so the philosophic
orientation known as 'postmodernism' (or 'po-mo,' to the cognoscenti) has
become the dominant mindset in many humanities departments in American
universities, especially in English departments. ... The po-mo view is
metaphysically anti-realist and anti-naturalist ... socially subjectivist
in epistemology ... In short, postmodernism is relativism run riot, skepticism
on stilts." -- Gary Jason, "Socialism's
Last Bastion"
An Environmental Economics professor is accused of stealing manure.
Insert your own joke here.
"... many academic colleagues working in my field of basic biological
research ... would run over their grandmothers to claim priority for a
discovery, impose their pet theory on the field, obtain a research grant,
win an award or garner a promotion. It's the same in other scientific fields
..." -- Thomas P. Stossel in The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 30, 2005
as quoted here
"The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is
that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the
left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order
to survive." -- Thomas
Sowell
"When I see a Teresa Heinz Kerry or George Soros, or the Hollywood elite,
or the pampered professoriate, I see out-of-touch utopians who lecture
others to do what they never would. Sort of the Kerry SUV syndrome or the
big mansions of a Barbra Streisand lecturing on conservation." -- Victor
Davis Hanson |
