Slay the Monsters, Save the Future: Part I

Modern societies are dying from within, being choked to death by monstrous institutional entities of their own making. The particular monster of today’s discussion is the university, a corrupt bastion of ideological indoctrination, massive misallocation of funds into the $trillions, destroyer of untold numbers of young lives, and home to loathsome parasitic creatures in need of slaying.

“Our higher education system is still stuck in the Middle Ages.”

Our current university system has not changed significantly in over 1000 years, [Christine] Ortiz said. __ Former Dean of Graduate Education at MIT

How to Kill the University and Save the Future

To kill the university monster, one must stop its heart, cut it out, and burn it. Where can one find the heart of the monster? Start looking in the lecture halls. Lectures are a fit tool for mass indoctrination, daydreaming, and large scale babysitting for college-aged youth. But fit for little else.

Lecture, rote memorization, and (largely ineffective) short-term study habits are still the norm in college instruction and learning today. __ Critical Thinking

Universities are teaching lies and getting away with it

It is unfortunate that modern university faculties have become dominated by a monoculture of ideologues intent on turning students into drone-like cannon fodder to serve their cause. The lecture is a perfect tool to that end, when combined with a mandated regurgitation by rote of the professor’s notes — rather than independent and considered points of view, as one would expect from a well-educated group of students.

Imagine a university without classrooms, lectures, disciplinary departments, or majors.

Our current university system has not changed significantly in over 1000 years, Ortiz said. So she and her colleagues are building a nonprofit university that:

• focuses on the transdisciplinary interface between technology and humanity
• emphasizes personalized, holistic and research-based pedagogy
• employs dynamic organizational structures and a high quality, low cost, scalable financial model, to serve more underserved and underprivileged students

__ Techrepublic

The new approach to education described by Dean Ortiz above is not unique in its attempt to revolutionise an obsolete and destructive system of higher education. The Minerva Schools represent another approach to higher learning that has eliminated lectures altogether. Instead, Minerva focuses on critical thinking, interdisciplinary problem-solving, project orientation, and world travel to help youth understand more perspectives of thinking.

San Francisco’s Holberton School is another approach that eliminates lectures. The school has no teachers, no lectures, no tuition:

Harvard’s Dean of Applied Physics, Eric Mazur, is another strenuous critic of the lecture system. Mazur wants to move teaching away from lectures and rote memorisation, toward conceptually rich problem-solving methods of learning.

… if we really want students to learn through problem-solving, classrooms will have to change at every level of education. “I think you see that the learning at a very young age takes place very differently—not by asking how but by asking why—and driving parents and teachers crazy. After they get to middle school, all that curiosity has been erased, probably because people discourage the question ‘why?’” says Mazur.

“I consider that my most important task—reawakening their curiosity.” ___ https://www.asme.org/career-education/articles/undergraduate-students/the-death-of-the-lecture

Modern Universities are Obsolete and Destructive Inbred Monstrosities

One cannot build an abundant and expansive future upon systems of learning which dominate today’s higher education landscape. $Trillions of dollars are being diverted away from more productive enterprises toward the dead end rat-hole which modern universities have come to represent.

If you want to save the future, slay a monster. While many modern universities could survive without lectures, they would lose much of the mystique which allows them to currently abuse and defraud so many hundreds of thousands of students, parents, and society in general. It is the future — the long-postponed abundant and expansive human future — which we are missing. Sadly, in today’s world of predatory institutional monsters, most people will never know that such a future was ever possible.

Modern universities have become places where youth go to binge, fornicate, burn through hundreds of $thousands of someone else’s money, and receive a world class indoctrination. At the end of it all, the lucky ones receive a piece of paper to hang on the wall of their basement or garage bedrooms — a mocking reminder of failed promises made to them by monsters they had failed to slay.

Backlash against campus revolt

Universities making war on the people who write their checks

DON’T GO TO COLLEGE! said the self-made millionaire

Students forced to endure — and pay for — “diversity training” indoctrination

Diversity training scam examined