"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
It's a quote often attributed to Mark Twain but researchers have found it belongs more to novelist Grant Allen, a man who was highly critical of his time in schools. He wrote an essay in The Westminster Gazette wherein he wrote on the subject of schooling vs real experience:
One year in Italy with their eyes open would be worth more than three at Oxford; and six months in the fields with a platyscopic lens would teach them strange things about the world around them that all the long terms at Harrow and Winchester have failed to discover to them. But that would involve some trouble to the teacher.
What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys’ schooling interfere with their education!
My loyal readers will know that I have something of a prejudice toward America's education system. Not only was I brought up when schools first began dosing children with Ritalin to improve their test scores for kickbacks and funds, but I also discovered something early on that Allen spent so much time preaching about.
"Education" is too often the failure to learn anything about the world. Children spend more time learning things they'll never use again instead of learning something that would benefit them for the rest of their lives. They don't know their constitutional rights, how to cook, change a tire, do their taxes, how the stock market works, and you can forget the proper way to use various tools.
Higher education was where a lot of that kind of education was supposed to happen, and the dream was that you performed well in school so that you could get into college, and there was no college you could go to that was better than the Ivy League college. Graduating from Harvard, Princeton, or Yale meant that you were the cream of the crop. A high-paying position was almost guaranteed out of University, and there are headhunters from corporations and government looking to bring you in to work for them.
The Ivy League dominates America. Its connections run deep. Its influence is undeniable. Telling someone you're a Harvard alum automatically wins you a sort of respect in many circles. These are the elite. The best and brightest.
But something happened.
Like the Ivy League villains in every 80s movie, pride and privilege got into the heads of those who attended these schools. As my fellow editor Susie Moore pointed out in her piece, the students began feeling like their privilege protected them. The tenured professors who were radicalized to the left at some point in their past pushed their politics on these students, brainwashing them into beings of pure emotion, often reacting to anything with robotic-like programming.
This mixture of unthinking, unintelligent, yet oddly well-coordinated radicalism turned what were once beacons of intelligence, creativity, and leadership into hives of radical leftist activism.
The issue is that these radical activists still bear the names of Harvard and Dartmouth when they go out into the corporate world, and these names still hold weight. They still manage to gain high positions in these companies and utilize their power and influence to change the corporate culture, manipulate policies, and ultimately transform the places they infest into activist hives themselves.
You've seen this in various corporations over just the past few years.
(READ: Disney Whistleblower Claims Conservative Employees Were Targeted While Woke Employees Were Rewarded)
These institutions are deeply engrained with money and connections. The depths of their power and influence go into places you would be surprised by. But everything has to have its season, and perhaps the green of the Ivy League schools needs to find itself turning a shade of brown.
For one, the idea that these students are protected by privilege needs to be torpedoed. Luckily, this is happening now. The students who signed the anti-Israel letter out of Harvard are watching as career opportunities are being stripped from them. Major law firms are eliminating these students' chances of joining up with a wave of their hands, making it clear that the privilege of radicalism isn't a privilege at all; it's a curse that you can and will be judged by.
Moreover, these universities need to find themselves choked financially. They aren't producing the best and brightest anymore, and as such, they need to find themselves losing money. Donors need to begin putting their money to better use for starters.
But it goes beyond donors. Our own taxpayer dollars provide endowments that range anywhere from $20 to $50 billion.
The spigot has to be either turned off or reduced drastically. No more money for activist factories.
But most importantly, we need a cultural shift in America when it comes to its understanding of Ivy League schools. These aren't what they used to be. They are no longer the height of education; they are the depths of it. They cannot be trusted with the youthful minds of America, as it's clear that too many of them have been manipulated, morphed, and transformed into being useless tools of an ideology.
America needs to let go of the Ivy League dream because that dream is clearly dead.
