It's true: College is driving your kids insane
New research suggests campus life inculcates anger, anxiety, degradation, depression, suicide
Published: 8 hours ago
Americans are understandably alarmed at the hordes of “migrants” and “refugees” streaming into this country, many steeped in worldviews profoundly opposed to Western, democratic values, and thus not only unlikely to assimilate, but even posing a danger to the nation.
But what about the hordes of young adults streaming into American society from this country’s colleges, many of them likewise indoctrinated in a worldview utterly antithetical to bedrock American values and who are not only ignorant of, but contemptuous toward, this nation’s unique system of individual liberty, Judeo-Christian morality and limited government?
Like the legions entering America from adversarial foreign cultures, many of these “new arrivals” from totalitarian campus cultures are also likely to come into serious conflict with a constitutional republic which, as John Adams said, was “fit only for a moral and religious people.”
Today’s news reports increasingly feature bizarre, unbelievable stories from America’s colleges. For example, one recent viral video report documented almost 60 Yale students enthusiastically signing a petition to repeal the First Amendment – the part of the Bill of Rights that guarantees their own right to freedom of speech, religion, the press, assembly and, ironically, to petition!
Equally disturbing were reports that, shortly after news broke in November of the terror attacks that paralyzed Paris and resulted in 130 gruesome murders and another 368 wounded, college activists in the U.S. bitterly complained that the media were focusing on Paris and terrorism – and no longer obsessing over them and their “grievances” (alleged racial incidents like the mysterious appearance of a “poop swastika” on the wall of a University of Missouri dormitory bathroom).
In response to these and numerous other campus news stories, many are sounding the alarm. America’s top schools, we are told, seem to be morphing into a cross between totalitarian indoctrination facilities and daycare centers.
Some characterize the growing campus madness as a “war on free speech” or “on the First Amendment,” while others decry “political correctness run amok” and the phantom menace of “micro-aggressions” (harmless statements with no malintent, but nevertheless deemed aggressive attacks on “minority populations”). Still others focus on the wider political implications, i.e., the indoctrination of students to serve as “useful idiots” and “ground troops” for the radical left’s ongoing transformation of America.
But these characterizations, while true and troubling enough, are incomplete and don’t encompass the deeper reality of what is actually occurring on many of America’s college campuses.
‘Teaching students to think pathologically’
One little-publicized puzzle piece is the stunning rise in cases of mental illness on campus, with depression rates skyrocketing and suicide now the second most common cause of death among college students. Why would this be?
For one thing, according to recent peer-reviewed research, the ubiquitous campus “hook-up” culture of promiscuous, casual sex is now proven to result in “higher levels of depression” (not to mention sexual violence and STDs) in college women. Indeed, the ever-more-perverse sexual revolution, unleashed on America by the left decades ago, pervades university life and is actively promoted by outrageous on-campus programs like the popular “Sex Week.” Birthed at Yale, but now held annually at Harvard, Brown and dozens of other top-rated schools, “Sex Week” prominently features panels of porn stars, graphic sex tips (including how-to workshops on anal sex and BDSM-flogging), free condoms and much more.
Snap! Find out how and why the Obama Left is driving millions of Americans over the cliff into depression, family breakdown, violence, mental illness and addiction – and how to stop it! – in David Kupelian’s blockbuster “The Snapping of the American Mind.”
Thus, for far too many of our young people, the college experience is annihilating their innocence big-time and thereby sowing within them tremendous inner conflict, anxiety, guilt and self-loathing. This conflict, in turn, is often breezily diagnosed as “depression” and masked with powerful and poorly understood psychiatric drugs with fearsome side effects.
There’s more. In an anxious age of “micro-aggressions,” “trigger warnings” and dozens of new gender variants (each requiring its own unique pronoun like “ze,” “hir” and “xem” to avoid giving offense – or even incurring a huge fine), today’s punitive and intimidating culture of extreme political correctness is literally making students mentally ill. The influential article “The Coddling of the American Mind,” featured in September’s issue of the Atlantic, revealed that what is happening on today’s college campuses, especially with regard to policing speech and punishing “offenders,” is “likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.”
All of this, mind you, is on top of the baseline reality that for decades, left-wing America-hating professors have been indoctrinating America’s children into believing their country is malevolent, racist and predatory – successful and powerful only by virtue of exploiting other races and stealing the world’s wealth. (This conviction is central to the worldview of Barack Obama, endlessly obsessed with downgrading America in every sphere and benefiting the rest of the world, whether by turning the U.S. over to foreigners, or by redistributing Americans’ wealth through ludicrous “climate change” schemes, and so on.)
And there is still more to consider.
Today, many of our colleges are not only ripping off young Americans’ morality and virtue, not just intimidating and confusing them with crackpot gender-identity social-justice theories, not content merely to continue cranking out thousands of leftist radical clones – young adults indoctrinated in the angry, self-righteous but deluded worldview of the far left. No, they are now programming these young Americans to take offense at the slightest wrong – or even at no wrong at all. (For example, being white is now an offense, under the guilt-trip label of “white privilege.”) In other words, many students are literally being taught to hate, to blame, “to think pathologically,” to see themselves as victims and to demonize and silence those who hold contrary views. In this way, they become essentially incapable of functioning competently and responsibly in the real world.
Think of it: During this all-important time at college – the very last stop after leaving their parents’ nest, supposedly designed to prepare them for a successful and happy life – instead of being taught how to deal with life’s challenges and developing the disciplines of a mature adult, they are being taught the opposite.
The Puritans established the first American colleges, including Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth, to train the next generation of Christian leaders. But many of these same colleges today have become seminaries for fashioning the next generation of angry, discontented progressives – true believers in perpetual victimhood and the saving virtues of an all-powerful government. And no wonder: The left’s Holy Grail has long been to create a large enough dependent class to comprise a “permanent progressive voting majority” in America, thus assuring the left unending one-party rule.
Fortunately, there still are a few traditional and Christian colleges in today’s America, offering those desiring a college education alternatives to the secular schools increasingly smothered by the madness of unchecked left-wing utopianism.
Historian Willian Lind has described American colleges as “small, ivy-covered North Koreas,” miniature reflections of one of the most terrifying utopian societies on earth. But understand, what we’re seeing unfold on our nation’s college campuses is not some bizarre affliction that has mysteriously and randomly been visited upon the American academy. Rather, we are witnessing, in a more pure and concentrated form, the totalitarian future the far left is steadily imposing on America as a whole, especially in her vast urban areas.
Today’s colleges, complicit in the indoctrination and corruption of untold numbers of young Americans, comprise just one more reminder that the hard left, though ascendant in America – indeed, wielding power in every major institution, including government – is, in its core worldview, delusional. And while many liberals insist they don’t condone the naked totalitarianism now manifesting in the university, they would do well to consider that such is the predictable result when you’re in the business of tearing down the established order – especially when that order is the best mankind has ever produced – while vainly imagining that your angry, self-righteous rebellion against common sense, basic morality, the hard-won lessons of history and the laws of God will somehow result in something better.
Read more at
http://www.wnd.com/2016/01/its-true-college-is-driving-your-kids-insane/#eHjvHleUFHcdFUZw.99
