I won’t spend time justifying the assumption in the title. We all know the problem. I probably should have left out the qualifier before ‘education’.
So far, there are two sorts of attempts to fight back:
(1) Engage the enemy on his own terrain. We do this via student conservative/libertarian groups. (Here, I prefer the libertarians to go over the top and take the bullets. I see Libertarianism as, sort of, ‘conservatism with a human face’. It’s easier to break a Lefty’s self-confidence if you’re arguing from a Libertarian perspective. Once that’s done, the target has been softened up for sensible conservatives to come in.)
This is fine. But … it’s not going to have huge effect. Because the problem is, the Left dominate the faculty, the course syllabi, the whole atmosphere. They have whole departments – Diversity and Inclusion – devoted to destroying the idea of objective reality – far more potent than some Postmodernist social scientist.
And we’re not going to crack that. Even if we could sneak our grad students past the Selection Committee and get a few more professors … and even if they could lie about their beliefs for the years it took to gain tenure [ andt the Christians have shown us that it’s okay to lie, “Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam”]. And even tenure is no longer protection. In any case, few people are going to be that dedicated.
So we can more or less write off the current higher education system. We can conduct a few guerilla operations there, but it’s enemy territory.
(2) Start, or reinforce, our own Higher Education intitutions. Okay, there’s Hillsdale College, and the budding University of Austin … and one or two others. And a fair number of Christian institutions, [2022 Best Christian Colleges in America - Niche] … but the Enemy has penetrated even there, and, at any rate, secular conservatives are going to have an uneasy relationship with them. And the really conservative ones tend to be fundamentalist. (Would you really want to teach at Oral Roberts University [Oral Roberts University - Wikipedia] (if you have a penchant for salacious stories, shame on you, do read that Wiki article … it seems ole Satan was at work there and that it’s not only Lefties who are attracted to underage children). or Bob Jones University [ Bob Jones University - Wikipedia ] where Satan also seems to have enrolled. )
Hopefully, the University of Texas at Austin, if it ever gets accredited, will do better. [ UATX’s Forbidden Courses Program: A Summary | City Journal]
[https://www.uaustin.org/ ]
But this is nibbling around the edges. I think technology may have given us the opportunity to challenge the whole system.
(Okay, the top Ivies are still going to attract the smartest students. Not necessarily because these students want to learn anything, but because a degree from one of them is ticket to a good job. Bryan Caplan has spelled this out very well here: Bryan Caplan The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
[ https://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Against-Education-audiobook/dp/B07BH3S9DQ ]
So … what to do?
Answer: we should start a campaign to put education – and not just higher education – on line.
I won’t elaborate here, but I’ll just assert that there are now enough, or almost enough, excellent videos which can reproduce what a lecturer can do, *and more – with animations.) Add to that some interactive computer programs to allow students to test themselves, plus an online forum , and Zoom sessions, where students can ask questions of qualified people, and each other … and you can deliver whatever it is that schools and universities claim to deliver now. And it’s much easier to check for political bias.
All right, there won’t be the same opportunities for drinking and drugs and … romance … but you can’t have everything.
(Okay, a declaration of interest: about 40 years ago I edited a book on Computer-Aided Language Learning, and for the last thirty years or so I have been employed by an online degree program run by a well-known British university.)
So … the content of a good education can be delivered by modern technology.
But … what about accreditation? Suppose, all on their own, students work hard for several years watchng videos, doing online tests, reading books, taking part in discussions … and now have a full knowledge of, say, what is taught in an undergraduate mathematics degree. So what? Where’s that slip of paper which says they have this, that ‘signal’ as Bryan Caplan puts it.
There’s the rub. And there’s where we need to have a campaign.
Here’s my proposal. Every academic discipline should form a ‘College of Cardinals’ equivalent, drawn from many countries, which would draw up a full course syllabus for its discipline – that is, the equivalent of all the syllabi that you would see if you took an undergraduate degree in that subject. In order to say you have an undergraduate education in X, here are the subjects you must have successfully studied.
And then … it must arrange to conduct examinations, at least annually, in that subject. This will cost money, of course. You pay to take the examination.
This is how music works. If you have a Grade 8 in, say, violin – it means you have sat real examinations in the subject. You take the exams when you want (as they are available), and if you fail, you can study more and re-sit.
Exams cannot be done via Zoom, at home. Believe me, it just doesn’t work. (I have just finished marking exams in a university computer science course that were taken via Zoom, with the students supposedly under surveilance. Ha! Kids who obviously had only a basic grasp of English were submitting exams with answers to questions which were letter-perfect, idiomatic, … don’t discount human ingenuity!)
So the exams have to be conducted in person, at hired venues.
Pass enough such courses, with the requisite grades, and you get a degree, certified by the College of Mathematicians or Political Scientists, or whatever.
Objections: practical coursework; Answer: summer schools.
Look, it’s already been done. Check out the British ‘Open University’: [ Open University - Wikipedia ]
[ University of London Worldwide ]
But the OU charges fairly high fees, and its degree doesn’t really have the international cachet that an ‘official’ College of [insert subject here] would have.
This is the key. Just as with music – where you are not required to study with any particular school or teacher or anyone at all, you just take the exam – we need to have an accreditation system which is independent of the route you took to get to the point where you can take the exam.
Of course, just as there are music teachers, there would almost certainly be private tutors to help you with your studies. You might even find whole institutions springing up, whose purpose was to teach for these international examinations.
But it would allow students who didn’t want to pay the eye-watering fees of current universities (in America, anyway), to get a recognized degree for much less money, on their own time.
The same apparatus could be extended to preparing for the GED, thus extending the appeal of ‘home-schooling’, another battleground where we must establish a strong presence. (Although here, via elections to school boards, we have a much better chance of taking the fight to the enemy. It’s a separate subject, but we need to both try to take control of the state education system, support School Choice, and promote Home Schooling.)
[ General Educational Development - Wikipedia ]
Tactical considerations: the absolute key here is to get mass support for this idea, and especially among academics. Without that, it’s pie in the sky.
It absolutely must not have even the hint of a conservative plot to undermine the current universities. Rather, it needs to be presented, if anything, as a liberal idea, to bring education to people who cannot now afford it. Which it would actually do. (A couple of multi-millionaires could fund a few hundred people to translate all those English-language videos etc into a dozen or so of the world’s other major languages. So the bright child of poor Bolivian peasant could get an excellent education, almost for nothing. See the ‘One Laptop per Child’ program, a good idea which fizzled out: [ One Laptop per Child - Wikipedia ]
Okay … probably a utopian scheme. Start shooting.