“Can you imagine the absurdity of the dog therapy and the days of weeping at some of these schools? For therapy, take some of these kids behind the woodshed. A good spanking would do them a lot of good. How would you like to have to hire some of these babies?”
“We don’t need to educate the uneducated, we need to un-educate the educated”
I’m not quite sure of the point of the letter: we should remain uneducated instead of attending liberal schools, perhaps? I cannot imagine writing something like that letter.
That’s just an excuse to have a dog in the library. They had a sheep at the commuter school down the road, and a lot of those students are straight out of inner-city high schools.
I think my school has a club devoted to that, actually.
I’ll bite. So a person sends a letter to their local newspaper in their hometown. There are all kinds of people everywhere. Just ignore them and choose to live with a more likeminded population instead. Be thankful most of the country is not like that person. btw- what was once liberal often becomes conservative as societies constantly evolve.
I sometimes read the comments attached to online articles in the local papers about my alma mater, a top 5 LAC. There’s stuff like this all the time. Silly stuff. Let it roll off. I’m thrilled my kiddo decided to go there
Recent elections have somehow unleashed or lowered the bar for appropriate discourse. What once would have been considered in bad taste now passes for “political talk”. Really even my middle school students behave better than most adults these days. We’ve embarrassed ourselves as a nation. The dumbing down of America continues and it’s not therapy dogs who are to blame or an education at a LAC.
Wow, that was a really short letter. I guess I was expecting something longer and more thought out. Silly me. The author is advocating for “uneducated” I suppose.
I’ll have to assume this means giving up modern medicine, engineering, advances in understanding brain cognition, etc, and returning to the bloodletting, horse and buggy, and “learn or I’ll beat you” days as those were far better times for humanity, no?
Sigh * These posts show such a misunderstanding of what actually happens at colleges, it would be funny if not for the fact that people actually think this way.
The “problem” as I see it from oodles of students heading off each year (I work in a high school) is that they are raised in somewhat of a social bubble generally akin to what their parents think/believe, etc. When they get to college they meet a much wider diversity of students than they’ve seen before (for many anyway - there are some exceptions in some families/situations of course). They realize that those students are real humans - just like them. It doesn’t matter what skin color they are, where the birth lottery put them on this planet or economically, what religious beliefs they might have, etc, etc, etc. That discovery (that these students are real humans) tends to adjust their brains into thinking perhaps they don’t want to do anything to hurt them IRL or via their voting on issues or actions, etc.
It tends to have nothing to do with college profs in the vast majority of cases. They’re still learning Physics or Calculus or Engineering or _____ in class. It’s the rest of life that lets them experience the real world and their thinking brain that causes them to change thoughts.
That said, many youngsters still believe the world (and everyone in it) is good, so as they experience some of the not-so-good things life can throw at them, thoughts can get modified again, but IME that’s rarely back to “Bubble” stage.
I didn’t have a problem with the comments to the article. The article itself was clearly written by a Neanderthal: someone semi-literate (the article was just babbling, without a clear point) and full of hate.
That’s probably the best explanation of it I have ever heard @Creekland and I think extraordinarily accurate. From my experience I have been exposed to an extraordinary amount of new perspectives, and most importantly people, when entering college. Those people come from all walks of life and some face extraordinary amounts of struggle because of how society views them. That really changes your own perspective on how you view the world, and what had previously was a far-off group of people or idea, becomes a face of someone you know. It is not the learning inside the classroom as much as it is the learning outside of the classroom. And that is something that is difficult to forget even when going back to your hometowns in which you came.
I get accused sometimes of trying to “rewrite history” when people hear about my researching/teaching. Why yes, yes I am trying to rewrite history since the history most of us were taught is wrong.
But there’s no real point in arguing with people 99% of the time. I just have to hope they send their kids my way. (Then again, I’m in a somewhat liberal school in a very liberal department. The odds are high that their kids wouldn’t be in my classes anyway )
Another variation of the “Get off my lawn” type comments made by closed-minded older generations and their sympathizers against those of the younger generation and more open-minded folks.
The letter writer may see him/herself in the following Weird Al song “When I was your age”:
Also, I wouldn’t recommend s/he go around trying to spank the “young’uns”. Not only would that risk an assault and battery charge at a minimum…s/he may also be unlucky to encounter one who happens to be a black belt or proficient in urban street fighting. If it’s the latter, the attempts at spanking may end up with him/her being “learnt a lesson”…along with earning a stay at a local hospital.
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