Thursday, November 6, 2008

Most College Students Lack Enough Literacy To Vote Right

Early this morning I was having coffee with some of the old-timers at the coffee shop, as is my custom, and some of the guys were lamenting their adult children’s ideological support for the radical left political agenda during this recent election. They could not understand how or why their children, whom they raised in church-going families with traditional, conservative values could possibly approve of things like environmentalism, gay rights, same sex marriage, abortion on demand, universal entitlements and, worst of all, cast their votes for the most radical, left-leaning, Democrat ever, Barack Obama.

I jokingly pointed them to the common denominator; each one of them subjected their children to twelve years of public education and then topped it off by paying lots of money to send them to secular universities for four years of godless, liberal indoctrination.

I clipped an article a few years ago and tucked it away in my file drawer. The title is, STUDY: Most College Students Lack Enough Literacy For Common Tasks.

According to the author, Ben Feller, the 2003 study revealed that more than 50% of students at four-year schools and more than 75% at two-year colleges lack the skills to perform complex literacy tasks. That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit-card offers with different interest rates and annual fees, or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

So what did they do with all the money you spent to educate your children? You presumed that the purpose of education was to teach your children how to read, and write, and count, and think. You were wrong. You unknowingly subjected them to social experimentation, social engineering, and liberal, secular humanist philosophies. They did not teach your children how to think; they told them what to think.

Dan Phillips, in his excellent and dead on analysis of the 2008 election, A Lament For America, refers to public schools as, “government reeducation camps” and attributes some of the blame for the Obama win at their doorsteps. “The government school system didn't help, creating uneducated, uninformed, fact-starved glandlings, who mistake emoting for rational thought. These folks have been raised from toddlerhood on the state's teat. The State is a kindly face embodied in Miss Parkins in pre-school; when you're eighteen, you've long-since learned to see The State as your friend and guardian. As designed. And so you vote.”

That explains a lot. If anyone was paying attention to some of the demographic polling data on election night, you may have heard this alarming little tidbit of information. Voters with college educations favored Obama; McCain was favored by those without college educations. That 2003 study suddenly has new relevance. Apparently, most college students lack enough literacy to vote right.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

College students haven't impressed since I was a college student and thought I and my peers knew it all. Now college students seem as dumb or dumber than I was and that's saying something.