Re-educating Your Kids

December 16, 2005

 

If you're worried about your college-age student having his or her mental hard-drive wiped clean by a covey of college professors who replace your values with their warped worldview, you're not alone. Parents are increasingly apprehensive about shoving their little ones out of the nest only to have the hungry wolves of academia waiting to devour them. But we want our kids, if they're willing and able, to continue their education beyond the bounds of the local high school, right?

 

Trouble is, there are enough horror stories of brainwashing flying around to scare any parent. Ordinarily innocuous classes like accounting and science are used by some professors to re-educate your child in Marxist tradition. Students espousing conservative views are browbeat by their professors and ridiculed in front of the whole class. Thought-provoking papers that dare challenge the liberal outlook on life are given low marks while sycophantic suck-ups are rewarded.

 

One professor at a local university has taken a particular interest in debating me in absentia during class time and in the local newspaper. Instead of taking the high road through a thoughtful discourse backed up by facts, he chooses to call me names and rants in unintelligible liberal speak. A frustrated talk show host, no doubt, but someone who is being paid with your tuition money to pollute the uncontaminated pool it took you 18 years of thoughtful care to fill.

 

Take heart. There is a resource out there that helps parents navigate through the choppy waters of college education. The Young America's Foundation releases its annual list of the top ten colleges and universities that best promote “traditional values” and encourage conservative thought and study.

 

Not surprisingly, Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan tops the list. This is the school touted by commentator Paul Harvey. Hillsdale is unabashedly conservative and caters specifically to like-minded parents and students. Other notable picks were Liberty University and Patrick Henry College, two of three Virginia schools in the top ten.

 

Conspicuously absent were any state-supported schools. If there's any solace, there were no state-supported schools on Princeton Review's annual list of the top ten liberal colleges. Still, with arguably most of the country being conservative and those conservatives footing the bill for state-supported schools, in part, through their tax dollars, you would think they'd insist on some quality control. The sad reality is, the average taxpayer is more concerned about his state university winning in football or basketball than he is in what's being force-fed down his little darling's throat.

 

Even esteemed universities like Vanderbilt, which owes its very existence to the ultimate capitalist, Commodore Vanderbilt, has been infested by the very antithesis of the long list of graduates who have made that institution great. Yet alumni still blindly support their alma mater generously with not nearly enough strings attached. Having participated in a number of debates there, I can tell you it almost feels as if you're entering another country once you pass through her gates.

 

What, then, do we as parents do? We must begin insisting on accountability when it comes to indoctrination. We must ferret out those professors who insist on furthering their own political agenda at the expense of our own children's education. We must demand that the universities, especially the tax-supported ones, reflect our values.

 

I'm not suggesting we micro-manage the curriculum. I'm saying, instead, that we should demand that college professors stick to their subjects instead of meddling where they have no business meddling.

 

I'm just a few, short years from having three boys in college. If conditions continue to worsen, I'm seriously considering home-colleging my kids.