One time, we were assigned an article in college for a groupwork. One section mentioned a specific statement, and it laid out the problems with said statement. A groupmate went to extend the problem with the statement to the entire article. The specific was interpreted into the general with absolutely no validity whatsoever. It was quite jarring to witness in real time.
Another time, we had an art class presentation. My group dealt with Plato's definition of art. It wasn’t bad in that it misrepresented Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, as college students are wont to do. It’s just that they presented this misrepresentation in the most gimmicky talk show host way. Profane. It was like one of those gimmicky things in high school that teachers praise for effort and creativity. It was on the same level of those skits and mini-plays that neurotic female high school teachers make students do.
No one here was sentient. I refused to believe it.
Kant was next on the chopping block. I don't know the guy nor his works, so I didn’t care. The poor Greeks must have been rolling in their graves, however. Just imagine Aristotle, who wrote an entire manual of good living for his son, watching his ideas get butchered in the most innane way possible. Most jarringly, I knew that it wasn’t always like this.
Do we blame this on women being the social mainstream for teachers? Do we blame this on Boomers/Generation Xers psyopped by ‘gender equality’ or ‘gay marriage’? Or maybe even by environmentalism and ‘climate change,’ probably the most successful ones yet. Everyone should have noticed by now that school is where women and the ghey are worshipped, where we need to sit our male asses down and listen. But I must emphasize how deep the rot goes, how nonsensical it gets.
The rot goes so deep, that it affects those who go through it. Back in my college days, I made some observations about how college students are these days:
Everybody looks at you with glazed over eyes if you say something out of line, from presentations to personal conversations.
Absolute bad reading comprehension for not even complicated stuff.
The ones who try to rise above gets put down, but its more about intrigue now. People praise you in public and privately resent you
I know that these are not new observations, but they are very different when you observe it in real life. These traits converge into a near-universal listlessness in students. Nobody cares about anything other than each one's own trivialities. What more, this listlessness is contagious. No one takes the initiative. Pre-lockdown, this existed only in certain student groups. Now, it's true for almost everyone.
Being from a lower income family, I found most ironic that almost everyone was in favor of welfare state quasi-socialism. In discussions of social/economic matters I have never seen a proposal that does not come with ‘government policy,’ ‘more government program,’ etc. The only exception I had come across was my microeconomics professor, but that's as expected so it's insignificant. He was not explicitly against it, but I had never heard him make overtures to the government, so he was a breath of fresh air among them. Unfortunately, these sorts have drifted off culturally from old-time (nowadays) M. Friedman-Thatcher-Reagan neoconservative monetarism, to Sunstein-T. Friedman-Reich neoliberal, pseudo-Keynesianism, having dropped any pretense of common sympathy with the Christian middle class to adopt metrosexual secularism in full. Urban Philippine society’s cosmopolitan nature has done wonders to ruin our quality of thinking, both for so-called ‘scholars’ teaching in universities, and for the students whom they teach. This vicious cycle keeps propelling our downward spiral in quality of thinking.
I have since graduated, and now help out friends in their work. However, one certain school activity stood out to me as representative of how much nonsense gets peddled in Philippine colleges today. It might differ for Manila’s Big 4, or Mapua, or higher end colleges in provinces, but not by much, I’m sure. Fellglow Keep and Ryan Mello have told me so.
Use a Graphic Organizer that will differentiate the following terms
Ilustrado and Katipunero
Revolution and Himagsikan
Filipino and Tagalog
Bayani and Hero
La Liga Filipina and KKK
For non-Tagalog speakers out there, note that himagsikan is Tagalog for ‘rebellion,’ and bayani is Tagalog for ‘hero.’ This was an activity fit for grade school students being watched over by a female teacher with a tyrannical mother complex. Colleges before had students read articles, critique them, and write essays about their critiques. We were tasked with mincing words, digging up some linguistic hogwash where bayani has some sort of hidden meaning that the poor English word 'hero' does not have. If I didn’t have to shut off my brain for this groupwork, I would have answered that ‘One's in English and one's in Tagalog.’ Case closed.
But I guess that I expected too much. After all, I encountered women who thought that ‘prosperous’ was too ‘verbose’ a word for them. Looking back, college was nothing but summer camp for sex-having, alchoholic young adults. That was all there was.
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Vexillum works in Financial Modeling, and has observed the Walls of Jericho enclosing him since youth. He has since become an avid student of René Guénon, Thomism, and Aristotle. Follow him on Twitter @V1RGIL1US.
It's not that different, though it was a bit easier for me to find people to have strange conversations with. I still felt it was pretty gimmicky, though, and the focus was on career rather than ennui, but that might just be me being at the business school. - Big 4 Alumnus