Lobotomy? University Education? Tea?

The whole purpose of the frontal lobe of the brain is to enable one to make wise choices and intelligent plans. It is important to learn to plan one's life according to basic principles and values. Learning those principles and values is hard work--rationally and emotionally. That is how experience can turn into wisdom.

Sadly, many if not most modern universities in the west have been turned into centers for politically correct indoctrination. If the whole point of a university education is now to funnel students into one specific trajectory of thought and ideology, why not just get a frontal lobotomy? Seriously, if university staff and faculty are all tuned to one frequency of "correctness", what is the point of a university education besides indoctrination?

Between the ages of 18 and 25, the frontal lobes of young men and women are actively myelinating. Maturing minds need grist. If young minds are given pablum instead of grist, they turn to mush. That is typically what happens in universities today. When a student is overwhelmingly exposed to one point of view during this period of neurodevelopment, her ability to weigh conflicting points of view later in life can be compromised.

If a mind is well tuned, like a clavier, it produces amazing harmonies. But if a mind is held in an environment of minimal illumination, fed a liquid diet, confined from all movement--it becomes veal-mind. Veal-mind is very much like lobotomy-mind. Not capable of meaty thought. Veal-mind is the typical product of a modern university education. Monotonic thinking--choice-free! You can chew it with your gums! Toothless thinking. Effortless!

Can you imagine what Plato would have said about the modern university? Socrates? A descent into darkest denial of diversity of thought.

Curious. You can spend a "gazillion" dollars for an education and end up with a gummatous mind. Incapable of considering divergent ideas because you've never been exposed to more than one monotonic train of thought in your whole four years of mush. What is real? It really does not matter, does it?

A human mind has to learn epistemology--but in order to develop the capacity to choose between competing versions of truth, a mind must have wrestled with different contenders for favour.

I read Orwell's 1984 when I was in college. It would have been better had I wrestled with the ideas in the book when I was younger. Who can say when a mind is ready for such struggles? But can you imagine a mind that never read 1984--that never wrestled with such a nightmare world?

Could such a mind be considered a human mind? Not an enlightened mind, not a seasoned mind, not a competent mind to meet the future.

But that is the essence of the modern university. If there is any wrestling to be done, the answer is always there. There is never any doubt what the correct answer is. What is correct, is what is taught.

And that is lobotomy.


And heaven help the students who stray from "correct postures." If you have not looked into the widespread antagonism toward free speech and free expression that oppresses students at most modern universities, you have your head in some dark place. Perhaps a university classroom.

It should be apparent that this posting applies specifically to the social sciences, political science, language arts, philosophy, ethnic/gender studies and other non-science, non-math, non-engineering, and non-computer science courses.

If you read this study on the ideological distribution of university professors in various disciplines, you will see where the worst skewing occurs.

It is not that persons of one ideological persuasion are incapable of presenting different viewpoints to students. Back in the middle part of the 20th century, that is the way courses were taught by almost all faculty. Sometime in the 1970s on, professors became progressively less willing to expose students to more than one viewpoint--their own. That is the current state of affairs. Professors are unwilling to stray from (political) correctness for reasons of their own.