{"id":1603312,"date":"2022-08-12T12:47:15","date_gmt":"2022-08-12T16:47:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1603312"},"modified":"2022-08-12T12:47:26","modified_gmt":"2022-08-12T16:47:26","slug":"charlie-kirk-you-dont-need-college-to-become-educated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/charlie-kirk-you-dont-need-college-to-become-educated\/","title":{"rendered":"Charlie Kirk: You Don\u2019t Need College To Become Educated"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fcharlie-kirk-you-dont-need-college-to-become-educated%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1603312&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>What do <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/news\/jokes-aside-bill-maher-may-be-the-most-rational-voice-in-american-politics\">Bill Maher<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=VSJP0P9cSMM\">Charlie Kirk<\/a> have in common?<\/p>\n<p>Not much, it\u2019s true. But in one important regard they agree completely. Both Maher and Kirk believe that college is a scam. How many of us can agree? Not many, given the size of academia. But after reading Kirk\u2019s new book, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/College-Scam-Universities-Bankrupting-Brainwashing\/dp\/1735503738\">The College Scam<\/a>: How America\u2019s Universities are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America\u2019s Youth, readers will find it hard to disagree.<\/p>\n<p>I opened the book\u2014his ten counts against college\u2014with some trepidation.\u00a0Not because I thought I would disagree, I don\u2019t, but because I thought I would agree\u2014I was predisposed to agree because of what I have seen and heard.\u00a0Yet, because I have spent the bulk of my career working in higher education, it is not easy to say that I have been participating in a scam. <\/p>\n<p>In some ways, anyone who works in academia, despite her own teaching practices, is complicit. Kirk has written a damning book for a college professor to read.<\/p>\n<p>Among Kirk\u2019s ten counts, the most troubling for me are the following: Count 4: \u201cColleges Do Not Educate Anymore\u201d; Count 5: \u201cCollege Ruins the Ability to Think and Reason\u201d; and Count 6: \u201cCollege Indoctrinates Students and Represses Speech\u201d\u2014the heart of his case. <\/p>\n<p>Of course, running throughout the book is his indictment that college costs too much money for what you don\u2019t get. No one today would argue with those claims. But the others? Colleges teach students to hate; they teach violence. They teach woke ideology. Even those few of us college professors who try every day to fight against these realities must admit, after reading Kirk\u2019s book, that we are fighting a losing battle. What can one or two professors on a campus do to teach students to think, to teach them facts, to lead them to wisdom, to maintain high standards, to allow free speech? How do we hold out against the rest of a faculty who rejects these as the purpose of a college education? Or fight the woke culture on nearly every college and university campus? Every day we hear of yet another tenured professor who could not do it.<\/p>\n<p>Kirk lays out his case chapter by chapter. Does he overstate his case? Let\u2019s look at Counts 4-6 to get an idea of the claims, evidence, and analysis Kirk uses\u2014the standard academic formula. Under Count 4, Kirk cites the shrinking number of days students must attend college for their degree; the lack of challenging courses; and the number of students who \u201cattend\u201d phantom classes and receive phantom grades, as has happened at the academically \u201celite\u201d universities, such as University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (see pages 66-68), among others. He quotes one student as saying, \u201cwe just watched videos and documentaries\u2026 it wasn\u2019t all that challenging\u201d (71).<\/p>\n<p>Far too many students make no progress in learning after two years; Kirk cites a University of Chicago Study, \u201cAcademically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses\u201d (68) and reinforces it with a 2017 story in The Wall Street Journal that cites similar results. Kirk also cites the views of several CEOs who claim they can no longer find recent graduates to recruit because \u201cthey can\u2019t do the job\u201d (67).<\/p>\n<p>Kirk does admit that certain professions, like those in STEM, require a college degree and most likely graduate work. Though, needing higher education can also be true for those in the humanities, which is something Kirk doesn\u2019t consider. I asked a former student who just graduated from Medill School of Journalism if college was worth the cost, and she said \u201cYes. I wouldn\u2019t have gotten into Medill without my degree.\u201d Another student who graduated with her said, \u201cYes and no\u2026 No, because not enough professors pushed us to think outside\u201d the cultural narratives. And a third said, categorically, \u201cNo. It was not worth it.\u201d All are currently working.<\/p>\n<p>Now let\u2019s turn to Count 5, the chapter Kirk entitles \u201cThe Lunacy of College.\u201d Do colleges teach students to think and reason? If we believe my students cited above, the answer is no. Most professors today are driven by ideology, not curiosity. Kirk claims that \u201cno idea is too radical, irrational, or downright insane for academia to disseminate\u201d (82). In support, he retells the story of fake, peer-reviewed journal articles that made preposterous arguments\u2014accepted for publication, but utter nonsense. Later in the chapter, he cites an actual peer-reviewed article that argued against American apple pie, in the academic\u2019s view a symbol of racism and oppression.<\/p>\n<p>Kirk talks about biology and science generally trying to deny the difference between men and women and the danger to premed students and future patients this holds. Kirk cites the following medical differences: \u201cin kidney function\u2026 in heart attacks\u2026 In other words, biological sex is a hugely important factor in knowing what ails patients and how to properly treat them\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What do Bill Maher and Charlie Kirk have in common? Not much, it\u2019s true. But in one important regard they agree completely. Both Maher and Kirk believe that college is a scam. How many of us can agree? Not many, given the size of academia. But after reading Kirk\u2019s new book, The College Scam: How &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1603389,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1603312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1603312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1603389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1603312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1603312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1603312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}