GUTFELD: Colleges are brain-free zones for the future
COLLEGES are supposed to be places where students can think. The reality is that they become the echo chambers that create the conditions for students to think.
They are supposed to be places where people are encouraged to interact, build friendships and learn from each other.
What they are increasingly becoming, under the guise and pressure of an “educational mission,” is places where students are encouraged to engage in groupthink and to think in a way that is completely controlled by the teachers.
In my opinion, that is one of the primary reasons that colleges and universities are failing.
In the old Soviet Union, the only way to become educated was to enter an institution. In the United States, the only way to become educated is to enter a college.
The real life of an academic is to be in a classroom, and to sit and listen to students talk, talk, talk, about whatever they want to talk about.
As a graduate student, you will be expected to be active in classroom discussions.
An academic can be an expert in “X” – but when the students are in a class, they are all interested in “X”.
The reality is that colleges are in the business of “teaching” students to think, and to think according to the way the teachers think.
And what they do is – “think”.
This kind of thinking is at the core of political philosophy and the foundation of scientific research.
It is at the core of virtually every great enterprise of American industry.
However, they also promote a very narrow and limited model of what is considered “thinking”.
Their model of thinking is that the teacher should be the sole originator of thought, and that students should never challenge the teacher’s thinking.
It is a model that says “a student should not think for themselves.”
This model is the model that has created the intellectual and social chasm between the world of academia and that which most Americans know and experience.
It has created the gulf between the “thinking” generation and that which is called “being