We are now approaching the time when the truth of that prediction can be tested. Two-thirds of Canadians between the ages of 25 and 64 now have a post-secondary education. Since the proportion of those benefiting from higher ed continues to rise, it follows that the vast majority of younger Canadian adults have, or will obtain, a university degree or some other kind of post-secondary diploma.
As a result, universities and colleges are now filled with students across the entire spectrum of ability, from members of the intellectual elite to a much larger number of people of more or less average and even well below average academic ability.
Teaching this great mass of the population has meant recruiting a staggeringly large number of professors relative to the population of philosophers and scientists that staffed the academy of earlier times.
Of this great body of scholars, it is inevitable that many are more like their students in intellectual capacity than the giants of a former age with whom they might wish to be ranked.
Transformation of the university and college community from one of relative intellectual brilliance to one of mere normal intelligence has necessarily resulted in changes to both the objectives and the results of higher education.
The idea that students will be taught by a university education how to think has now been abandoned. Instead students are taught facts and technical routines. Progress is evaluated chiefly by multiple choice "mid-terms" that are conducted on a more or less monthly basis, with the result that students can graduate with all A grades and only the vaguest recollection of what they learnt the month before last.
This kind of education lends itself well to standardization, automation, indoctrination, and massive cost saving.
If students are to receive instruction unfiltered by the mind of a scholar long immersed in the subject, but are merely to be imbued with a set of facts, then the tendency will inevitably be to adopt a nationally agreed-upon set of standard facts as presented in a limited range of texts prepared by one or other of a handful of multi-national publishing corporations.
Inculcation of standardized facts provides obvious scope for indoctrination, which is to say, the instilling of beneficial ideas, as judged by the shapers of national education: ideas about economics, for example, and in particular the desirability of globalization and the hence the necessity of unrestricted international movement not only of goods, but of people, capital and technology.
Indeed, all politically correct ideas, from the proper practice of medicine, to sex "education," and transgender bathrooms can be propagated efficiently by means of standardized texts.
Interview with an immigrant from Hitler's Germany:
Trump is not like Hitler. Just because a leader wants order doesn't mean they're like a dictator.
What reminds me more of Hitler than anything else isn't Trump, it's the destruction of freedom of speech on the college campuses — the agendas fueled by the professors. That's how Hitler started, he pulled in the youth to miseducate them, to brainwash them, it's happening today." Marion Ingeborg Andrews (née Muller). |
A further great advantage of standardization of educational information content combined with multiple choice examinations is that student evaluation can be largely automated, thus making intelligent teachers essentially redundant. Now, permanently employed professors with life-time salaries and pensions can be replaced by adjuncts hired at minimum wage and micro-managed by non-academic educational executives.
But what is the result of this transformation of higher education from a training for a gifted minority by devoted scholars seeking to imbue students with a broad grasp of a subject and the ability to think and write clearly, to a system of mass indoctrination with official facts and ready-made beliefs?
The result is exactly as one would expect: a large number of young people possessed of only a narrow perspective often based on propaganda, who are unduly confident of the rightness of their school-certified opinions for which they are incapable of giving a rational justification.
Modern higher education has thus bred a generation of bigoted ignoramuses, seemingly immune to the idea that they might be wrong about anything, let alone almost everything, and unaware that such rebelliousness and contempt for authority as they may display has been carefully inculcated by a ruling elite intent on destroying Western civilization and exterminating the European nations for the obstacle that they represent in the push for global governance.
Moreover, having been taught to assimilate facts without analysis or serious consideration of the evidence to support the facts, they are wide open to propaganda from any source.
These are the people at whom the fake news of the corporate media is directed. If Syria's President Assad is said to have killed thousands of people without trial, then Syria should be bombed until Assad has been killed or removed from power. This without reflection on, or probably any knowledge about, the extremely dodgy war-mongering sources of the allegation of Assad's crime.
Likewise, if Bill O'Reilly says Putin, "he's a killer," then that's enough for the fake news media to suggest that Trump is a killer too, since he has expressed respect for Putin.
This is stupidity of a high order.
But it works. Consider Canada and President Trump.
Throughout the 2016 US Presidential election campaign, Canada's state broadcaster, the CBC, relentlessly ridiculed and demeaned candidate Trump both in slanted news broadcasts and in a wide range of other programming, while it rooted consistently for Hillary, "I came, I saw, he died," Clinton. The same was true of a majority of Canada's corporate media outlets.
The result is that in academic circles and among Canada's widely mis-educated public, Donald Trump is rarely spoken of except in sneering and hate-filled terms.
A further result, as we learn from the [Toronto] Globe and Mail, is that "Canadians want Trudeau to stand up to Trump, even if it leads to trade war: poll".
That's how bigotry comes back to bite you. Canadians, for the most part, know nothing about Donald Trump's stated intentions, on the economy, on globalist wars of imperial aggression, or on his intention to seek Russian cooperation in the defeat of radical Islamic terrorism.
In fact, mostly, what Canadians think they know about Donald Trump is what Canada's state broadcaster has told them; namely, that Donald Trump is a racist, a misogynist, and a homophobe.
Based on such claims, many Canadians have enjoyed months of anti-Trump hate speech, which now propels them to urge their government to embark on a policy of serious national economic harm, a demand with which the Government of Canada seems anxious to comply.
In the face of Trump's election and promise to renegotiate NAFTA, Prime Minister Trudeau has appointed as Foreign Minister with special responsibility for trade negotiations Chrystia Freeland, a Russophobic, Ukrainian nationalist, whose Liberal Party constituency association urged Canadians to join the women's march in Washington, DC, protesting Donald Trump's inauguration.
The appointment obviously jeopardizes Canada's prospects for a satisfactory outcome to upcoming trade negotiations with the Trump Administration, which is likely already skeptical of a Canadian government headed by a man who so effusively praises the late Communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
Canada has a large tangible-goods trade surplus with the United States. Canada supplies many US markets, for example, cars, lumber, energy and steel, in which Donald Trump has pledged to increase American employment.
So do Canadians really wish to trash thousands of those well-paid jobs here in Canada for the mindless pleasure of insulting the US President?
Apparently, yes. Which brings me back to Malcolm Muggeridge's prediction: "When everyone has a university degree, no one will know anything at all."
That seems to be almost where Canada is right now. No wonder we elected the worst Prime Minister since Pierre Elliot Trudeau.
Happily, some still navigate a passage through the Canadian system of higher education with a clear mind, a thirst for knowledge and the ability to figure things out for themselves. For that we can probably thank the fact that a higher culture is still perpetuated within families, among friends and by a residue of old school professors who see their primary role to be that of a teacher.
Related:
Globe and Mail: Freeland knew her grandfather was editor of Nazi newspaper
CanSpeccy: IQism, Racism and the Decay of the Great American University
Howard Kunstler: American Schooling's "Epic Failure" Under Federal "Policy Experts"
Foreign Min. deletes anti-Trump protest info after Rebel report:
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