(Thanks to “Unknowable” for the news tip)
It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between college students and 5-year-olds.
The “honors dorm” (good grief!) at University of Massachusetts-Amherst is now festooned with Care Bears posters to help students cope with the stresses of life. The Care Bears provide these budding intellectuals with helpful admonitions to eat healthy, get plenty of exercise, relax, think happy thoughts, etc. The young intellectuals might have missed these lessons in kindergarten, amid all the bother about choosing your gender and hating Donald Trump, so they’re getting them now. In college.
A few find this treatment “condescending,” if not downright ridiculous; but to others, says a student, “They think this is the new normal.”
Hello! Wake up, America! You have a gigantic problem looming up, a few years down the road. What is the country supposed to do with tens of thousands of college graduates who have been carefully taught to be completely useless? Better think of something quick!
Collidge edumacashuns maks yu al smirt n stuff. Itt maks yu tuff an prepears yu fur lif n stuff.
Forward Comrade to the glorious people’s collective utopia! Yes we can.
Umm…ummm…ummm.
Condescending is the word. Care Bears were a greeting card idea, little bears from the land of Care-A-Lot that . . . well . . . cared. It was basically an idea to sell some greeting cards and toys which could be marketed on the notion that they promoted positive values. Of course the operative phrase her is “positive values”; whose positive values are we talking about? Sometimes caring and compassion are used to justify enablement. Some behavior is bad for its practitioners and enabling that on the basis of “caring” is not really so caring after all. I don’t know what the Care Bears message was to any degree of detail, so I can’t comment further.
But the whole notion, while good for selling greeting cards, doesn’t strike me as a very good way to teach values to anyone, of any age. Care-A-Lot isn’t the real world and teaching values based upon a mythical world doesn’t strike me as very valuable.
When I was in grade school, there was a bit of this sort of thing, the idea of retaining the attention of children by employing cartoon characters. I’m certain that the saturation of this has increased significantly since my grade school days. I also recall occasions where morality lessons were thinly veiled as fairy tales, not the Brothers Grimm type, but fairy tales concocted to serve a specific purpose. I saw through those from day one; maybe I’m just a natural cynic.
But using such tactics is condescending, even to grade school children. Using this in college is a step beyond. I understand that college students are still young, but if they want to be children at that age, something is very wrong. If they have to be mollycoddled and handled with kid gloves at college age, when do they expect to take responsibility and become adults? I fear that the answer is never.
In my day, we would have been infuriated with such infantilism, and would have decorated posters like these with appropriate (or not) graffiti protests. But that was when we considered ourselves — rightly or wrongly — to be grownups.
It occurs to me that the students who bask in this infantilism use it as a drug, more to escape their fears than to calm them: to crawl back into a time when everyone coddled them and took hard decisions away from them, when nothing was their fault and erratic behavior on their part was considered “cute,” when expectations for them were low and anything they did manage to do — even going potty — was applauded.
Of course, their parents are partially to blame, for never demanding that they grow up.
I think you’ve described this perfectly. It infantilism and many of today’s youth are embracing it. Hey kids! This world is one tough $!%@* of a place. When I was 22 years old, I distinctly remember being on the roof of a house, at least 30′ off the ground, no safety equipment and no insurance, working on a cold fall day in order to make ends meet. Most of my work was white collar and well compensated, but in between I did some serious hard labor to fill in. I worked in freezing cold and snow, I worked at heights and some of it was back breaking. It taught me to build skills and find ways to make a steady living at less strenuous occupations.
People send their kids to college thinking the they will be assured employment, but these days that could be less than spectacular. There are lots of people with degrees working in convenience stores and fast-food restaurants; Even a valuable S.T.E.M. degree requires that one pays their dues in their chosen field and not everyone makes it.
In the meantime, the colleges are trying to keep these children as dependent as possible. It’s sickening. I’ve met recent college grads that struck me as truly sad examples. Some seem to think that they are going to come in and go straight to the top or that they know more than the experienced people already working here.
Undergraduate College today is nothing more than an extension of high school warehousing. 100 years ago an educated 16 year-old would be the equivalent of a Maters program – it’s that bad.
I agree. The entire education system seems to function as a babysitter for youngsters. In the days of the agro economy, children had value almost as soon as they could walk. They might have only functioned to pick crops or fetch water, but they were part of the family’s means of life from a very early age. Nowadays, youngsters are held out of the productive segment for as long as possible. 13 years in public school, 4 in college and not uncommonly another 2-4 in grad school.
Had I been handed some tools and some tasks when I was somewhere around 10 years old, I would have learned much more. I could have learned how to work with mechanical devices, electrical devices and musical instruments from an early age. I would have pursued math and science as a natural consequence of such experience. When I was in Jr. High, I spent my days dreaming about working on motorcycles. I would have been better off as an apprentice in a motorcycle shop. I wouldn’t have stayed in that business, by any means, but it would have helped me to find my direction earlier in life.
There are people who are scholars–not many–and college used to be for them. Not for everybody. Not used just to warehouse millions of people who have no clear function in society.
Also, the schools have been made into another kind of governmental welfare ghetto — and not just monetarily, although that’s how it all starts, with the students’ families being stripped of their capital and the students being made dependent on the government to subsidize their tuition and/or forgive their enormous debts. In addition to that immediate impoverishment and dependency on government, the students are also stripped of their earning potential: first, in being taught not to reason but only to react; second, in being given either no knowledge or false “knowledge” on which to base those reactions; third, in being lulled into infantilism, which of course includes throwing tantrums; fourth, in being trained to have those tantrums in reaction to stimuli provided by their leftist caretakers, stimuli based on the now firmly inculcated idea of endless entitlement and endless victimhood….
And so it goes. A captive, reactive mass for the government to manipulate as it wishes. On the surface, more “respectable” than the inner-city welfare culture, and actually claiming to be the elite of society, but really with the same dependency on others to take care of them, the same ignorance and illiteracy, and the same irrational volatility.
I retired from college teaching earlier than I’d planned when I realized that our students not only could no longer formulate a reasoned argument, not only had never been taught to reason in the first place, but actually had been taught that reasoning was bad and emotional reaction was good.
Amen, Phoebe. It’s insidious, and then some. Ultimately, I think it’s the demonic reasoning of those whom have left godliness entirely. Any strength of character, any ability to rise above problems and any noble instincts are trained out of kids today, from kindergarten to grad school.
And watch out for this disaster, coming swiftly round the bend, steered straight at us by Democrats–universal college with free tuition for all! And that should pretty much finish off America.
This needs no explanation – but it sure could use TAPS!
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/vampires-zombies-and-hooking-up-37-examples-of-real-college-courses-that-are-almost-too-crazy-to-believe
I’m waiting eagerly to interview a job candidate that refers to their course on Lady Gaga. 🙂
Years ago, I heard that Astrology and Gambling Statistics were courses offered. I thought that was outrageous. I really have no words for the ones discussed n this article – except maybe RIP.
Does the state of our culture ever make you want to just sit down and cry, after you’ve run out of laughs? I’m starting to get that reaction a lot.
Yes. Cry and pray – hard!