In Honor of the Class of 2020, Some Scalding Coffee

American Thinker:
By Robert Oscar Lopez.

In 2020 many memes pay homage to the high school and college seniors who were supposed to have a commencement and walk up in robes and square hats to receive diplomas. That is how civilized societies reward teenagers and young adults for wrapping up four years of general education. But the coronavirus changes everything, in the way money behaves in the Cyndi Lauper song “Money Changes Everything.” I wish I could be like the millions of people who can turn out a fulsome praise to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy.

Instead, I’d like to pay honor to the class of 2020 by giving them the precious gift of honesty. This crop of graduates has been lied to, probably more than any other. I should know, because for all the years they’ve lived, I was inside the machine that manufactured the lies.

This year I graduated at the age of forty-nine in my own way. After twenty years of teaching college students, I finally left my last academic job and moved on from academia. I watched twenty classes of students move through the system while these current graduates incubated. My departure was as unceremonious as their non-ceremonies are going to be.

So here’s some truth that needs to be told: Your teachers didn’t know what they were talking about most of the time. I know you may have liked many of them, but that’s a kind of Stockholm Syndrome you get from the deliberate mental work the institutions do on you. You’re in school and they are the ones to whom you are captive. That’s why they may have seemed so kind; they needed you to give them high teaching evaluations so they could be promoted.

The people who taught you English were trained by unhinged Marxists who never made them read much classic literature before throwing them in the classroom to teach you. They rarely studied any foreign languages so had no grasp of world literature or classical literature. They were trained to disregard the Christian Bible so they lacked any meaningful connection to the thousands of years that the Bible and churches influenced artistic expression. The departments that hired them wanted chatty courtiers who could talk about glossy critical theories. Search committees didn’t hire literature professors who had a broad background, largely because the people on the hiring committees lacked the range to understand what they were talking about in job interviews. So you got the teacher who showed up talking about feminist readings of Jane Austen novels, like a million other grad students.

I know this because I sat through graduate school in the 1990s and went to conference after conference with English teachers. READ MORE