I've been reading...

Brainwashed : How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youthby Ben Shapiro. I've already read and reviewed his only other book. In that review I did not mention how he could be kind of - I think Dalton over at D-Town Values has said it best:

There is only one bad thing about this book. Shapiro almost seems juvenile when he talks about these subjects. Let me try and be more specific. Every time Shapiro gives a point, he always fits in some sort of sly comment at the end.

Well, his first book is even worse in this area. Not only are the comments juvenile but at times they're uninformed. They seem to point out the areas where Mr. Shapiro has not completely thought about the issue.

Having said that though, again, I want to commend Mr. Shapiro for writing about this topic. His basic premise is correct. America's universities are full of liberal thinking professors and they are in complete control over what they teach and how they teach it.

I experienced this myself when I was at Kansas University for one semester. I had to write a paper on the controversial subject of Needle Exchange Programs. I used logic and reasoning in my NEP-condemning paper. Apparently these two things were out of fashion at the time and he gave me an F on my draft that I had spent weeks working on. He told me that the paper was irresponsible and that I needed to use statistics. I then proceeded, over the next two days, to rewrite my paper with his suggestions and to change it to a NEP-condoning paper. He loved it. In fact he liked it so much that he wanted my permission to hand it into the Freshman/Sophomore essay contest.

So the valuable lesson I learned in that class (and I do mean valuable, because I learned it quickly in my freshman year) was that logic and reasoning are dying and that statistics and feelings are replacing them.

To get back to Mr. Shapiro's book, I want to add that I thought his solution, while ostensibly impossible, is a good idea. He proposes that conservatives start up politically moderate universities and uses the success of the Fox News channel as an example. (It seems like I've heard of a university for homeschoolers but I can't seem to find it. Does anyone know?)

If I were a parent I wouldn't be waiting around for these start-up universities so I could send my children there and besides that I'm sure they would at some point start subverting youth as well. What I would do is spend my childrens youth on teaching them to be reasonable, logical thinkers and to fear God and his wisdom; to teach them to be discerning.

I believe the idea to keep children protected from contradictory teaching (to the parents teaching that is) is foolish. At some point these children themselves will be leaders of families and will need to know how to combat and protect their children from intellectual suicide and false teaching. How will they be able to do this without practical experience doing it (while they're still under your guidance I should add).

Of course there is a natural progression from protecting to teaching, with an overlap of them somewhere during adolesence, but at some point you will not be able to protect any longer. It's at this point that they must already be inviolable.