By Chris Hedges
Truthdig
December 08, 2008
The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Princeton and New Haven to the financial and political centers of power.
The nation’s elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers and rigid structures that are designed to produce certain answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service—economic, political and social—come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market, and with a highly specialized vocabulary. This vocabulary, a sign of the “specialist” and of course the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political and cultural questions. Those who defy the system—people like Ralph Nader—are branded as irrational and irrelevant. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement and information systems are the only things that matter.
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via Truthdig
Dandelion Salad 
When was thinking for oneself declared a crime? Everything is canned…and not just food.
This is one of the best articles I have read in a long time, and is so true, these practices of specialization are allowing our society to be dumbed down, remember what General Patton said, if everybody is thinking alike then somebody is not thinking. The United States is in self destruction, by a criminal element within our society, from within our boarders, but not only are they destroying others they are now destroying themselves, this time. Our days of imperialism and running a financial system based upon colonial empires needs to be over.
thank you for the article.
Thanks for your commentary, Jim. I thought it was a very insightful piece by Chris Hedges.
There must be something very wrong with our top universities … if dodo-heads and crooks graduate with the status of semi-geniuses …