Picking up on my own comment to yesterday’s “Agenda of some professor’s” post. . . .

Let us set aside the way some university professors deliberately and maliciously try to destroy their students’ faith, at a time when those students are eager to have their faith destroyed so that they can participate in the rank debauchery that characterizes most university campuses.

What kind of EDUCATION can students get where their professors teach them that Western civilization is worthless, that reason is invalid, that knowledge is unnecessary, that students can construct their own reality, and that there is no such thing as truth?

I guarantee that the level of discourse, the intellectual sophistication, and the mental development students receive at my Patrick Henry College–with its great books, courses in logic and rhetoric, and substantive programs–is far better than that students will receive at the postmodernist universities.

Yes, students who study engineering or some of the other technical fields can learn them at the big elite universities. And it is possible for grounded, self-disciplined, eager-to-learn students to pick good courses and professors from the vast smorgasbord or to educate themselves in the academic atmosphere. And other students may not learn anything, but they can learn how to do things, which may be all that is required in many professions today. But it is possible for students in some programs to come out worse educated than they came in, with the knowledge they came in with destroyed.

Doesn’t it concern parents, alumni, and taxpayers that it is the universities, ironically, that have become the centers of anti-intellectualism, opposition to knowledge, and narcissistic ignorance?

What is the educational value of institutions like that?

I suspect that most parents, not to mention their children, care nothing about the content or quality of the education they are receiving. Elite universities carry prestige, and that is all they care about. Ordinary universities can give tickets to a job, so that is all that matters. Many parents and students do not care about anything else, including the harm these places can do to young people’s faith and morals.

I think we need Christian institutions of higher education not just to protect young people but to keep learning alive. The church and specifically the monasteries kept learning alive through the barbarian vandalism of the Dark Ages, and I fear that we are back in that state. We need Christian universities, not to just colleges, to teach also the engineers, scientists, and technical fields, since those too, I think, are in danger in our relativistic intellectual climate. That’s why I wish the best for Baylor and other such ventures. But, in the meantime, support alternatives such as Patrick Henry College.

OK, maybe I am overstating the case. But don’t I have a point?

John Nolte hails a positive trend in television. Some of the most popular reality shows celebrate WORK. From The Return of the Working Class Hero:

We marvel at the men populating “Ice Road Truckers,” “The Deadliest Catch,” “Dirty Jobs,” and “American Chopper.” Men who cuss and smoke cigarettes and lose their tempers and get the job done. We marvel at the creativity that gets them through, and we marvel at those fascinating six minute segments taking us into the dit-dit of How It’s Made. We marvel enough that every new season brings another guy just doing what he does so well. This year it was exterminators. Like eating cotton candy or slowing to pick up the grisly details of a car crash, watching the fame-addicted humiliate themselves may well fascinate, but it doesn’t feel very good inside. But watching the people who take enormous pride in the difficult work they do makes this the healthiest television trend since Fox News upended the liberal media monopoly.

While the cultural divide grew as wide as flyover country between those who create television and those who watch it, we’ve seen the working class pretty much relegated to buffoonish sitcom husbands; balding, heavyset men, married to impossibly lovely wives who bubble with love but also deliver sharp zingers that manifest the contempt she (and the show’s creators) have for their mate’s humble station in life. Gone are the lunch bucket heroes. They’ve long been replaced by lawyers, doctors, perfectly tailored detectives, and Manhattan lofted friends.

But something good is happening on the higher-numbered channels where the nobility of hard work plays out in such a fascinating way that “The Deadliest Catch” has been “synergized” into a video game and a family of motorcycle builders are treated like movie stars by movie stars. Somewhere along the line, narcissism on parade took a back seat to the virtues of the men in flannel. Yes, it’s our dads, uncles, and neighbors.

I love those shows. Don’t you? Notice that they are celebrations of vocation!

This is depressing on so many levels: With Hired-Gun Favre, the Jets Embark on a New Era.

Many Olympic athletes kneel to pray before or after their event, point up to heaven to give glory to God, and witness to their faith when they are interviewed. Such public displays of religion are illegal in still-communist China. Some countries are forbidding their athletes from expressing their faith to respect Chinese law. The USA is not. Read this article: In Spite of Rules, Olympic Athletes Say They Won’t Lose Faith.

Do you think the Romans 13 injunction to obey the governing authorities applies to this?