Two professors at the University of Northern Colorado were investigated after students complained that they were forced to hear opposing viewpoints.The complaints were made to Northern Colorado's "Bias Response Team," an Orwellian office on campus that asks students to report their peers and professors for anything that upsets or offends them. When the news outlet Heat Street made an open records request for some of the complaints, it discovered that two students had become so upset about having to hear an opinion they disagreed with they filed reports with school administrators.
And rather than telling the students to buck up because they might hear those opinions outside of college or on the news or in the media, the schools told the professors to stop teaching that there's an alternate viewpoint.
If I were given plenipotentiary power, and were to attempt to engineer a population that’s unable to defend its own convictions, I would:
- Decree mandatory schooling for all young persons, preferably for sixteen years;
- Render all schools subordinate to my decisions concerning what shall and shall not be addressed there;
- Create exactly the kind of debate-averse climate – in which addressing opposing views is actually punishable – that the cited story describes.
Note also that the overlarge infants being trained thus not to think will some day rise to the levers of power in government and business. They may not be your problem today, but they will most assuredly become your problem tomorrow.
Parents of America: Guard your children’s minds against this sort of thing. Keep them out of the “educational system” – and yes, that includes our “institutions of higher education.”
4 comments:
I could not agree with you more. On every point you raised.
My daughter was receiving the same type education from our state university, so she transferred to a top flight Christian university in Waco Texas. Subtle enough? It's expensive, but worth every penny. She is receiving a top notch education tempered with Christian values.
The creation of "safe spaces" is a fairly recent development by that name, but I think first came to national attention when Larry Summers was dismissed as Harvard president after a woman professor complained a speech he gave made her physically sick.
By no means let it be thought by your readers that this is not all part of Critical Theorists' aim to eliminate individual liberties allegedly protected by our constitution.
Let me weave in a comment from a few days ago that seems to fit here.
It is becoming a crime to prick comatose consciences. The preliminary move can be seen in this sudden national attention on the demand for "safe spaces," where no potentially negative word is permitted.
To elaborate on your warning about implications of what's coming, try this.
The inability to accept the fact that life is filled with humans and, worse, to be prevented from learning to accept the inevitable imperfections of human actions and, subsequently, demanding preventative measures, is the road to slavery.
It is hard to imagine anything more stupid out there. We see it even out of allegedly brilliant hard scientists as they go along with fraudulent claims in order to get or keep their jobs. Suppression of hard facts by even those trained to deal exclusively with them makes it appear that too many of them are lacking the moral underpinnings needed to comprehend how they'll reap long term losses from short term gains. (Some have indeed fought back, but it appears all of those have been left high and dry by their more easily intimidated colleagues.)
I can see members of the faith-based communities chuckle, thinking that coercion to abandon objective facts is surely easier to expect of people who have no religious principles to reinforce their integrity.
Yet the tendency is found in all humans, from the allegedly devout all along the militant atheist. For it is one thing not to be able to have faith in G-d, but something else entirely not to be able to accept that Natural Law means there will be consequences to every act. Especially troublesome are those consequences kicked down the road like the looming national debt and unfunded liabilities mounting into the 100 trillions. It's like the moron who keeps building a house of playing cards one collapse after another and expecting a different outcome each time. Hence it is only a matter of time that the mention of natural law will be equated to mentioning G-d. Crooked politicians will demand it.
The very fact that there has been no outcry denouncing these developments (and they are not new as exemplified in the Summers case) from the institutions of society's moral sphere makes it pretty clear that that segment too has been co-opted into silence.
I know that you, Fran, have called your own denomination to task for falling short. But it is far from the only one. The denouncements must come from lay people like us. But the nature of the assault and the goal of those waging the war must be made clear. That's why I wove the earlier comment into this comment stream.
My point is that your quicky should not be seen as a stand-alone anecdote, but one in a long drawn-out process of incremental assaults, the end-goal being to outlaw all legitimate criticism of whatever tyrant claims the title.
In complete agreement with Rob above. Hence our young ones are at Catholic school. Excellent education with values that match those taught at home. Add encouragement to think critically about things, a good dose of history, and respect for the values our country was founded upon at home and we have the makings of some very strong 'bitter clingers'.
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