Critical Race Theory further devalues college education

Campuses were once places where ideas were debated.
Today they are places where any right-of-center opposition speech is labeled
“hate” and is shut down. Liberal schools like Emory, Middlebury and Brown fight
to keep right-of-center voices off campus. They do not educate, they
indoctrinate. And our country is paying the price.

College kids are so Bernie Sanders-liberal today — 41
percent of them don’t believe in free speech and the other 59 percent
believe the federal government should pay for it.

If you notice, most of the nonsense is at small
liberal arts schools (personally, I never trust a college that does not have a
football team). They have all bought into the Fauci government control of our
lives. If the government says so, we must all continue to wear masks for as
long as very unhealthy and old people continue to die.

A friend’s daughter has a $75,000 a year liberal arts
degree from Emory, which means she is a receptionist at her dad’s friend’s law
firm in New York. She is super liberal and buys into the notion that the world
will not be right until Washington and Lee University is named just “and.”

Teachers’ unions have taken their insanity to the next
level with the pushing of CRT (Critical Race Theory) in all classes. CRT is so
damaging, it escaped from a liberal arts college’s Humanities lab somewhere in
the Northeast. Too bad CRT was not invented in Vegas, so it would “stay in
Vegas.”

If our Founders were around today (after visiting the
Times Square theater district to catch the musical “Hamilton”), they would be
appalled by what has happened to education in America. The founding of this
country, something we all should celebrate, is now being taught in CRT as
something evil.

Colleges, which I have long said have priced
themselves out as a value proposition for many, are the front lines of the war
on free speech and common sense. Parents, students and employers must continue
to ask themselves if taking on so much student loan debt for such lame
“educations” is smart.

One-third of college students spend fewer than five
hours a week studying. That gives students and faculty time to go to the campus
quad and play Hacky Sack (with helmets and COVID-preventing masks for safety). You
can fully expect campuses to require kids to continue to wear masks post-COVID,
just to see if they can make them do it. They can just tell students that masks
will protect them from racial injustice, white supremacy and climate change.

Sadly, the middle-class is hurt most by prohibitive
costs. College costs have risen at twice the rate of inflation. My heart sinks
when I hear lower-to-middle class parents tell me their son or daughter is
going to an expensive college to study art history, sports marketing or English
Lit. I want to tell them to just save their money and do not take on student
loan debt, debt the government will readily strap them with, for such a degree.
Read “Beowulf” on your own; it is free. And let CNN point out all the “micro-aggressions”
to you; do not pay a college $45k a year to do that.

More kids should consider the military, trade school
or community colleges. Learn a trade or a business! And understand math. In today’s world, the richest 15 percent own 90 percent of the wealth, and the dumbest 15 percent have
90 percent of the Gender Studies degrees. If your Gender Studies degree is more than
five years old, it is worthless anyway. Back then there were only two genders to
study.

We have an unsustainable $25 trillion in national debt
and we spend our time fretting over PC silliness. And you wonder why China is
kicking our tails economically? In 2019 U.S. colleges issued more Visual and
Performing Arts degrees than in computer science and math.

The only thing CRT will help our kids with is perhaps
math, since it teaches that they can take money from others, it might make them
better at division.

We have dumbed
down our education system. As we know, subjects like math and English are
racist. To keep quantifiably smarter kids out of school, many California state
colleges no longer make them take the ACT or SAT. Instead, they proffer an
essay question to gain admission: If you divide white privilege by all the
white supremacists at the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, then
multiply by structural racism, how much climate change does that cause?

Ron Hart is a syndicated op-ed humorist,
award-winning author, and TV/radio commentator; you can reach him at Ron@RonaldHart.com or
Twitter @RonaldHart.