Education

Education

One thing that is often misinterpreted is that certain institutions get their prestige because of what they produce. Although this has at times in the past been true, it is not to be automatically assumed at this point in American history. Many of the United States best known universities are not prestigious on current accomplishments alone. They possibly are accomplished on the past doings of professors or students, but currently fail to meet up to the expectations that are put on the top schools in our country. A problem is that instead of continuing to move our though forward and advance ideas that have been the foundation of intellectual thought, educated people continue to build on fallacies from the past, or create new ideas, sufficing small amounts of evidence to prove their point and disprove past points.

Current intellectual thought is not precisely that. In many of these institutions, knowledge is not necessarily rewarded. Professors from the get-go teach students that they don't know things, in order to create a student body who believes that they do not know things, as opposed to teaching this student body what they need to know in order to form opinions and create knowledgeable ideas of their own. I make this statement based on the fact that many students in todays colleges don't come out knowing or needing to know what it is they study, which allows professors to in turn substitute rhetoric and personal beliefs in place of actual learning. From the beginning of postsecondary education, students are taught to believe whatever it may be that their professors are saying. This allows the professors to suffice propaganda for proper knowledge. Professors in turn use this extremely modifiable minds to meet their own ends. An example of this is Barack Obama. Mr. Obama is none the wiser for what he was taught at elitist schools. Listening to him speak belies the fact that he even went to one of these institutions, because of his seeming lack of knowledge about relevant thought and political ideas. The idea that tire inflation and tuneups will allow for as much oil to be saved as would be gotten from drilling is an idiotic hope that is unfounded, unintelligent and otherwise worthless. If, perhaps, 300 million Americans were driving around on flat tires with untuned engines, then that idea might work out. This, however, is not true as many Americans do the simple things that they can to make their cars run more efficiently and correctly. If institutions taught what knowledge driven thought consisted of, civic leaders would not be leading us into the same cruxes that have plagued our society since the beginning of the 20^th Century.

The beacon of American thought is learning and knowledge, yet somehow the people in the places that matter most have let that go, in hopes of passing their own agendas. Allowances for personal error are seldom made in American politics and society as it is seen as a weakness. As Americans are taught to be more accepting of others, those preaching that have done the opposite with their own. When a politician changes his or her opinion because they have realized the err of their ways, they are seen as a “flip flopper”, and not as someone who upon closer examination has decided to fix where they have wronged. I do not see the progress in politics or society that once set America apart from the rest of the world. Even the one institution that we perfected and allowed to function under our watch has started to come under fire from the elitist people who have become the bane of it in the first place. I am of course talking about capitalism, which if left to its own devices will function better than any known, and possible unknown, economic system. Adam Smith frequently spoke of an invisible hand that guided the economy to perfection or at least proper function. This invisible hand allowed for consumers and producers to decide where and what their desired price would be. An invisible hand was not government intervention, nor was it pressure from unrelated or uninvolved parties. This would be a visible hand, and would be synonymous with a communist or socialist economy.

Now is a more important time than the time of Adam Smith, as we not only have to stick up for our economy, but also our way of life and our rights as politicians and the educational elite allow more people to be a part of their plan to take over the American way of thinking. The American way of thinking is for individuals to have their own opinions, not for a elite group to tell people how to think, and if there is one thing to hold onto, that is it.