We're WEIRD. Get over it.

[pbrower2a]

(09-20-2020, 04:19 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I have also come up with something that might illustrate.  If I understand the theory and it has merit, then Liberty University may be an oxymoron.  Not just the name, though that might be true too, but the university.

A university was originally a place at which callow young men could learn in four years what wise men (and if you think male chauvinism is commonplace now, think of how bad it was back then!) had the opportunity to learn a significant chunk of the wisdom of the ages and what the hard knocks that many people learned from over forty or so years instead of sowing some wild oats. I doubt that anyone attends Liberty University for the chance to sow any wild oats. The idea, I suppose, is to learn some of that old wisdom but only what does not conflict with the biblical interpretation that Reverend Jerry Falwell, Sr. had. From what I understand, Liberty University shuts it out. Thus there is little mention of Marxism except to say that it is un-Biblical... see also evolution, which has been useful in science and ethically innocuous.

Contrast this with what some renowned Catholic universities do. The Catholic Church has an enmity with the anti-religious teachings of Marxism-Leninism that the Church sees as a symptom of the moral depravity of Communism. Rather than completely denying it and its relevance the Church  recognizes the philosophical basis and appeal that Communism has in achieving economic justice and social progress. The point made is that although economic justice and social progress are desirable in their own right and indeed must take precedence over class privilege, such can be achieved without the pathology of dictatorship and mass murder.  But one can make such a conclusion without being a Catholic. This said, if I had to choose between Notre Dame and Liberty University (even before the recent scandal) on behalf of a mainline Protestant kid, I would choose Notre Dame.
  
Now let's look at the scandals involving Liberty University, which is not so much a university in the sense that Notre Dame, the University of Virginia, or Stanford is. Liberty University is a money-making machine that turns student fees and costs into an enterprise running amok. Tax-exempt, it can go on a building frenzy without doing such things as research (can you imagine attending Liberty University to become a scientific researcher as one might at, perhaps the University of Virginia?) even if such is profitable -- it isn't as profitable as renting people some videos to teach them how to 'raise a Christian family'. Taxes are one way of keeping commercial entities from growing too fast for their own good, let alone Humanity as a whole.   The other part is that Jerry Falwell, Jr., is a reprobate who could never fit his father's standards of behavior.    

Quote:Universities are a prototypically western institution.  The students are self selected for reading and analytic thinking.  You throw a bunch of people with similar skills temporarily together to learn abstract concepts by doing more reading.  In short, you are choosing your most WEIRD people to come together to become more WIERED.  This is of course temporary, then you throw them back into your culture.  I don't care if the subject matter is how to become more tribal, you are training them to become more WIERD.  It seems almost counter productive.

Yes. I have seen literature on the college board exams, and the tests seem designed not so much as intelligence tests but also as means of casting out cranks, scatterbrains, and and intellectually-lazy people. People who see a university education as an excuse for partying are going to get keen knowledge of alcoholic beverages and juvenile antics but not what  a good college is about. It is no more effective than the School of Hard Knocks, but it can teach what that non-accredited quasi-institution offers in much less time and at far lesser personal cost.