College is a Poor Investment

Reading an editorial today by Walter Williams, a university professor of economics, he was reviewing an idea by another author that college is a waste of money and effort. If he disagreed with the idea, Dr. Williams didn't make it clear. As I read it I was filled with a Quixotic murkiness. The article was mad-making.

Dr. Williams decried that colleges no longer teach critical thinking, and that students can't work abstract concepts. I am amazed he is decrying it because he has followed the conservative agenda in America for years and, simply stated, the lack of critical thinking is the result of years of dirtying the idea of liberalism.

Let me explain. Before Bush the Elder's presidency -- where 'liberal' was demoted to the dirtiness of 'the L-word' (and wife Barbara said once that she was liberal; she never said it in public again and the incident was forgotten) -- colleges were called liberal arts institutions. This was because they taught a form of thinking called 'liberal', which means the same thing as critical thinking. In those days higher education taught a higher-order thinking process.

Enter an authoritarian era. History is rife with authoritarian types gaining control of government, spending on defense and neglecting education, and even arresting academics and intellectuals. It's easy to deduce that authoritarians are threatened by critical thinking. In this neoconservative era we have seen many challenges to education, including lack of funding and lawsuits against teachers who promote a liberal agenda.

Which clues us in to another feature of the authoritarian mindset. Such people believe that teaching means telling students what to believe. It reduces the threat that anybody thinks for themselves, sees into the machinations of the authoritarian agenda, and makes a stink. Critical thinking is a lot harder; it requires that you take a variety of information from a variety of sources, compare ideas with each other, compare them to previous experience and history, compare them to rules of logic and morality, and come to an informed decision on the topic. Rather than being taught what to think, liberalism teaches you how to think. Why would anybody object to someone learning how to think? I imagine it's a fear for those who are trying to rule by deceit.

Before Bush the Elder colleges taught critical thinking through a series of general education classes at a time when young people have begun thinking abstractly and have tamed it somewhat, but are still open to new ideas. They also had students focus on one or two areas as a major so that they would be prepared to enter the workforce as professionals. Trade schools only taught specific job skills in one area and those jobs were called, well, trades. We now have garbage haulers calling their jobs professions and careers, meaning we have lost the distinction.

This would explain the lament that college students can't think critically anymore, and that they can't use abstract ideas well. When liberalism is quashed and the students are only taught information about the job they will have afterward we have reduced college to expensive trade schools. We have lost the distinction, dumbed down the students, and lost the value of higher-order thinking.

So it is maddening that Dr. Williams decries this state of higher education when the mindset he champions created it. I don't know if he realizes it consciously -- he is certainly bright enough.

It is time for us to no longer allow authoritarians and their pundit mouthpieces to bash liberalism. It is time for us to remember what it really is, to expect colleges to teach it, to remand specific job training once again to trade schools, and to not let authoritarians grab control and wreck this portion of society again and not take responsibility for it.