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❤️❤️❤️ Reading Hegseth’s “Battle for the American Mind,” and this ties in nicely.

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“CRT tells kids that they are forever tied to the shackles of their skin color, that they cannot rise above their fate. That’s not what any child should be taught, let alone those being primed to run the nation.“

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Of course, universities are woke factories, too.

One institution that I would like to see undermined is the elite university, for a couple of reasons:

- The amount of tuition they're charging is just ridiculous, and most of it is going to extravagant architecture, landscaping, and an army of woke administrators. Many students graduate so deeply in debt that it will take them many years to pay it off, and that's their introduction to capitalism -- no wonder communism is so popular with millennials

- Meritocracy is being undermined, as is the teaching of genuine critical thinking, and this is the weakness -- if employers find a better way to select the most productive employees than choosing the ones who went to the most famous colleges, the public will quit making such ridiculous sacrifices to get their kids into the elite schools

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I think the traditional university education model is in decline. There are many jobs that can be trained into HS grads, including in tech, and people are waking up to the relative uselessness of liberal arts degrees in much of the job market.

All it'll take is for employers to remove "Bachelor's Degree Required" from their job postings.

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Yes, I agree.

Perhaps if there were standard testing centers, that could administer proctored tests to test knowledge in various fields, and IQ.

There are things that a college degree, even a non-technical one, weeds for that can't be assessed in a day of testing, like timeliness, willingness to do assigned tasks, follow instructions, and get along with authority figures. If those things could be assessed in some other, cheaper way, it would be a big breakthrough.

A huge factor in going to elite schools is that you'll make contacts with high-achieving peers, joining an "old-boy network" that will help you in your career.

I've heard that rich parents are very aware of this, and send their kids to expensive private K-12 schools and expensive summer camps, just so that they'll "make contacts" that will serve them for life.

I went to an elite college, but I didn't understand how important making contacts was. For complex reasons I wasn't crazy about the place and didn't bother getting involved in student life. My father was very successful, but he was self-made and went to a very unexceptional college, and he never told me how important the old-boy network would be.

There was one contact I made in college -- I had one 20-minute conversation about computers with the guy. I met up with him a year after graduation in Silicon Valley. Over the years, he helped me get 3 jobs, the last one working for him.

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That's the shame of it - that these elite schools' primary function is the perpetuation of the elite class. That they spout all sorts of nonsense about inclusion and diversity just reveals their hypocrisy. At least the old English peers were overt about their caste system.

I have a feeling that this culture has some rot therein, but since there's a vast amount of money out there, it's easily concealed.

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There was a cover story about this in National Review a few years ago.

The teachers at elite schools and universities generally learn quite left, and they feel guilty about conferring privilege upon those who were already most privileged to begin with. So they try to make up for it will all the social justice stuff.

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