| Real Dads Network - Making Connections One Dad at a Time | Volume 5 Issue 8 | ||||
 |
|||||
|
|||||
 Save as PDF |
||
Higher Education Gone Wrong: Universites Are Turning Into Corporate Drone Factories |
||
|
||
| Author: Kayode Bentley | Published: 10/14/09 | |
|
In decaying
societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the
democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and
presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working
class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises
to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the
spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. Once the lights
go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other large corporations have
the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they incurred playing casino
capitalism repaid with taxpayer money. We live in an age of
moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational
factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants
and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask
the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity
of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural
assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual
and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a
voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the
pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult
of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society,
which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The
methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs,
business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in
terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for
manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as
terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse. Our elites are imploding. Their fraud and
corruption are slowly being exposed as the disparity between their words and our
reality becomes wider and more apparent. The rage that is bubbling up across the
country will have to be countered by the elite with less subtle forms of
control. But unless we grasp the "societal play of forces that operates beneath
the surface of political forms" we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of
corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a
consumer society and instead wields power through naked
repression. Only 8 percent of
Mr. Damon’s findings speak to a wider body of evidence showing that young people around the world are putting off marriage and parenthood until well into their 20s, longer than their parents and grandparents did. The trend has spurred some psychologists to coin the term “emerging adulthood” to describe the period from 18 to 25 as a new transitional phase between adolescence and adulthood. The popular media also use “failure to launch” and “boomerang generation” to characterize the phenomenon and the increasing numbers of young people returning home after college, rather than charting a more independent life course. “People are beginning to look at this and
figure out what is going on in this period when young people seem to be in a
holding pattern, waiting for something to happen,” said James Youniss, a
professor of developmental psychology at Catholic University of America, in
Implications for Education
Mr. Damon concludes from his study that schools, communities, and parents can do much to reverse the malaise that plagues many young people. In the classroom, for instance, he said teachers can show students how the skills and content they are learning are useful and share stories of how they found their own callings. But the author’s main target in education is the current emphasis in schools on testing students, exemplified in part by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. He criticizes that trend for narrowing the curriculum and imposing what he sees as shortsighted educational goals on students.
“Unfortunately, all the emphasis on high-stakes testing has squeezed out time for guidance, the time that teachers can take to impart the usefulness and meaning of the skills they teach, activities like writing for the school newspaper or joining the French club,” Mr. Damon said in an interview. “Not every kid is going to find meaning in the three R’s. We are single-mindedly focusing on test scores as if the test scores in and of themselves are some kind of important goal for education.” Outside of schools, Mr. Damon offers praise for youth-building efforts like the Search Institute, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit organization that works with schools and communities to identify and strengthen community assets that can promote healthy psychological growth for children and adolescents. He says parents can contribute at home to children’s developing sense of purpose by listening closely to children’s expressed interests, fanning the flames of those sparks, discussing their own careers, and introducing their children to outside mentors for career guidance. “This is giving policymakers the
tools for looking at young people with a different lens,” said Richard M.
Lerner, a professor of applied developmental science at
Due to its length only part of this study has been
submitted for this month's article. For the full article email us at info@4ts.org requesting the full article along with this
title. Realize that these obstacles are only challenges that are within our control to change. Kayode Bentley President & Founder, 4T’s Productions Email: info@4ts.org
| ||
