Picture lush rolling verdant green landscapes, huge shade trees, old Italian red-roofed architecture, lifetime friends, timeless texts, devoted professors, conscientious students taking notes—voila, the American College. But not anymore. Parents still seem to choose a college by factoring in how beautiful it looks, but without taking even a cursory look inside—deep inside—into what the professors really believe, and what the peers (the great majority arriving with 18,000+ hours of media programming, including X- and R-rated violence, rage, sex and killing) bring with them into this pastoral scene. As a former speaker quipped, "The modern college is a trip through Babylon. If the content won't destroy you, the dorm life will."
It is not uncommon for thousands of students to graduate with their first divorce-like relationship tucked quietly under their belt—an affair (or serial affairs) that lasted four years—but now it's on to greener (browner) pastures, with even less devotion? In addition, students now graduate with life-time crippling debt—some at over $100,000. Some will never get free of the economic shackles they donned in college, until they die. At $100 a month, they'd have to live 100 years to erase the principal, not to mention the interest. After acquiring even the most modest of homes, most will die with debt. What does life look like starting out that buried in debt, at age 22? Grandparents and parents will never know; they didn't suffer it. They didn't suffer the pre-marriage marriages, either. And what becomes of a current student's faith? Their belief in the Judeo-Christian God gets tossed into the jaws of liberalism; it is ripped and torn and pummeled relentlessly without mitigation for four years, both subtly (at the presupposition level) and overtly. The student now emerges with a "tattered rags of a faith" to cling to for the rest of life's real vicissitudes. A concentration camp blasting and brainwashing over loudspeakers could finish it off no better.
How much robbery is a college education worth? Students today trade their virginity, their future economic freedom, and/or their faith—and often all three. Some don't know what the career is that a general education gave them—it is still a mystery on graduation day. What career does one move into, after majoring in Women's Studies or Anthropology? Or a minor in Gay Rights Sensitivity Training or Ethnic Studies or Modern Dance? Fully 350,000 college grads around the country are working cashier’s jobs because their college education couldn’t deliver them a job in the real world.
Trade schools can train us for specific careers, without the liberal packaging, at half the time and cost, while living apart from dorms that have become full-scale brothels. We live in real homes the rest of our real life—so, why stay at the pagan resort for four years? Only ghettos require mob living—heavy metal music, smoking, drinking, sex and drugs—and living in close quarters with previously unknown persons.
Nonetheless, college advocates still balk at the idea of departing from modern colleges. What about a broad general Western Civilization exposure? That exposure should be trained in high school English classes, to replace the drivel that now occupies those hours, and then followed by lifetime personal reading. Ask any educated person, who continues to grow in culture, and you'll find that a classical understanding is gained by systematically continuing to read over a lifetime. One couldn't possibly make a dent in it in a class or two in college. But let's take the masks off of the masquerade. Are we really losing Western Civilization exposure when we've replaced those classics with Islamic literature and literature dripping with Eastern mysticism? One can't even find those traditional cultural literacy classes listed in many college course listings today. They’ve been replaced with another agenda. Places like Harvard now boast dozens of 27 GLBTQ classes (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer). Book titles like Dance with Wolves, Miranda, Trapped, and Things Fall Apart, are taught instead of Western Civ classics.
The general "good for you" education is a charade—a vestigial hook to keep the song and dance going. Because of our failing economy, by the sheer force of devastating institutional economics, brick and mortar educational institutions will have to give way to online education, conventions, seminars, symposiums, and apprenticeships. The shift has already taken place in the lower grades via the homeschool movement. Full curriculums can be purchased and monitored, flanked by tutorials of groups of students for short periods of time, without the live-in sanctioned, unlimited debauchery baptism. What is such an education worth? If we viewed it without the brick and mortar edifice, would we pay money to have an institution undo everything we’ve ever trained into our offspring?
Is it time to exit? To find alternatives? It all depends upon the price you're willing to pay. In the Bible, when the man went and "sold everything he had” it was for the pearl of great price: a living faith in the Judeo-Christian God. He did not sell everything he had in exchange for more loss to himself. He did not pay to lose his faith. "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked [anti-God professors], nor stands in the way of sinners [godless peers], nor sits in the seat of scoffers" (Psalm 1:1). The liberal Christian colleges are following just behind the secular colleges. One of their course titles is "Why Jesus Was a Homosexual." One suspects that the scoffers' seats are nestled mostly in college classrooms. There the sitting down is complete and the metamorphosis is uncontested and total.
There are a growing number of books and articles out now by well-known Christians crying the outrage over the moral descent of the college campus—but few are brave enough to say it is perhaps time to exit entirely.
