OPINION:
It is time we face the facts. My industry — our country’s educational establishment — has produced a nation of intellectual infants who are incapable of crawling out of their emotional cribs.
We are a culture of children; a people frozen in a time where young men and women are handicapped in perpetual immaturity; an infantilized world where everyone seems content to push and shove and grab and cry as they move from “toy to toy” and emotion to emotion; a nightmare, of sorts, where adulthood is somehow evil and no one wants to grow up and where everyone is content to crawl rather than walk.
Today’s schools, colleges and universities have become little more than cultural “day cares” — places of sniffles, diapers and tantrums; classrooms and campuses laden with cries of “me” and “mine” and “you hurt my feelings.”
Rationality is out. Identity is in.
Reason and logic are now disparaged as evidence of toxic masculinity.
The wisdom of the ages is dismissed as a “trope” and “archaic” thinking. Adherence to Judeo-Christian orthodoxy is equated with racism. Defending traditional sexual mores is panned as bigotry and hate. Arguments for American exceptionalism are disregarded as evidence of white privilege. The study of our nation’s Founding documents is set aside in favor of courses in “intersectionality,” “gender studies” and “critical race theory.”
Two thousand years of church teaching on natural law, biblical justice, ethics and human dignity is simply ignored. Biology is unheeded in favor of an imaginary world of dress-up and make-believe. We claim to be champions of science while we scoff at its defenders as being “science deniers.” Women are denied the right to their own toilets by those who claim to “identify” as women.
We have actually come to a point where we celebrate the sexualization of 11-year-old boys pretending to be girls and where we take seriously the claims of adults who pretend to be children. Consensual incest is defended by professors at our nation’s “finest” universities and pederasty is now described as personal “orientation” on the same moral plane as other sexual inclinations and desires.
Politicians and professors now smile and applaud as devout Christians are maligned, silenced and prosecuted in our communities, our culture and our courts.
This, my friends, is the wonder and beauty of progressive “tolerance.”
This is the millennial definition of “love.”
Welcome to the Brave New World of those who strut about, naked as a jaybird, in their emperor’s clothes of “inclusion and acceptance.”
Welcome to a land where those waving their banners of love actually look forward to the day of sitting in the coliseum and being entertained as they watch all who dare dissent from their progressive orthodoxy being brought to their knees.
Welcome to a day where our next generation truly seems to relish the thought of having the power to give a thumbs up or thumbs down on whether or not a human being with hands, lungs, eyes and a pulsing heart, (whether born or unborn), should live or die.
Welcome to a time where those who condemn others for being judgmental yearn for the day they will be our judge.
Welcome to the millennial ivory tower. A place of selfishness, arrogance and condescension. A citadel of chronological snobbery. Classrooms that elevate feelings over facts and emotions over reality. Laboratories where science is denied and lecture halls where history is ridiculed. A culture of perpetual adolescence; of pouting, of preening and of posturing.
Universities where faculty are so blind to their own hypocrisy that they say such self-refuting and stupid things as “I can’t tolerate intolerance and I hate those who are hateful.” Students who are so clueless of their own duplicity that they claim to be champions of “inclusion” while proudly excluding all those they don’t want to include.
This is education in the 21st century, and the proof is seen in its outcomes.
There is a reason our young men and young women can no longer define what it means to be a male or a female. There is a reason our next generation is so narcissistic and self-absorbed. There is a reason millennials treat each other as objects of recreation rather than human beings worthy of respect. There is reason we actually believe giving government more control over our lives will result in us having more freedom in how we live. There is a reason for this lunacy and it all goes back to education.
It has been said that what is taught today in our classrooms will be practiced tomorrow in our culture. Ideas have consequences. Ideas matter and the lousy ideas we are peddling in our classrooms are bearing themselves out in our culture, our Congress and our courts on a daily basis.
You can’t feed our next generation ideological carcinogens week after week and year after year and be surprised to learn they now have cancer of heart, mind and soul.
• Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, is the author of “Not A Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery 2017).
Please read our comment policy before commenting.