The general difficulty in talking about ideas and culture in America partially derives from the abolition of fixed curricula in higher education. Without reference to a common set of books, without an objective definition of what it means to be educated, makes it so that discussion between strangers must fall to some lowest common denominator that all parties can comprehend.

Because of this, you often wind up with people talking around one another, in which both parties have bad mental models of what’s going on with the other person, because they both have such wildly different backgrounds. A reference to an important work or thinker is likely to be misunderstood in discussion, because it’s likely that one party or another has never even heard of it, or is only familiar with it in the abstract.

Further, because of the meaningless specialization of the last century or so, different schools of thought which cover the same topic may have entirely different methodologies and sets of jargon. The academics prize the development of new ‘discoveries,’ no matter how trivial, and reward originality even when the original work is either pointless or spurious. The arts and natural sciences, once unified under the humanities, have instead been balkanized and fractured.

In the world outside of academia, the arts and sciences are actually not fractured.

For example, software engineers in modern firms need to take into account market dynamics, aesthetics, user demands, and internal politics within their organizations to actually produce usable software. They coding part makes up a minimal portion of the labor-hours of a senior level engineer, who will typically be bumped into a political position which requires political-economic skills in addition to technical mastery.

High levels of technical specialization are less necessary than breadth, because apart from a small number of superb individuals, humans need broad political talent, especially on large projects, much more than they need narrow technical excellence.

So in this the centuries-long call for ‘practical’ education is almost always in practice impractical, because it produces overspecialized people who are mis-trained into the bureaucratic needs of the academy rather than the flexible, dynamic needs of the natural world. The degrees rewarded by these academies, although portrayed as standards, are instead mixed standards, because the curricula are not even close to uniform, and neither are the standards by which they are awarded.

So, what should we hope for from higher education for men? We should expect far less of it, and reserve it for a far, far tinier number of people, and stop considering them centers for ‘research,’ because research divorced from the surrounding society tends towards yak-shaving. The primary goal should be to preserve classical learning. The secondary goal should be to prepare graduates for their future specialization. The tertiary goal should be to acculturate the leadership class, help them to make social bonds, and provide a common cultural framework that facilitates cooperation within that class.

Finally, there is no reason as to why most of these goals can’t be achieved by independent tutors for most people of means, or otherwise bypassed by non-institutional methods. Mercantile success has rarely matched up well with academic success. If you are concerned about the undue influence of money in politics, it’d be a good idea to revoke many of the privileges that universities currently enjoy with respect to intelligence testing, as they serve as legal proxies to insulate companies from accusations of discriminatory hiring practices.

It might also be sensible to restore the religious purpose of universities, to reduce the temporal power accorded to the graduates, and formalize that distinction.

Reducing the scale at which higher education is expected to perform also makes standardization less necessary. When there is less focus on standardization, people can evaluate education on a more qualitative basis. It also becomes possible to make the programs far more rigorous.

In terms of increasing your understanding of your fellow Americans currently, it’s good to recognize that you may have almost nothing in common in terms of intellectual background with the people that you speak with. There’s a solid chance, especially if they’re younger, that they are totally unfamiliar with anything substantive.

They may be well-read in some small portion of human knowledge, but it’s likely that they are not familiar with something that you’re talking about within what you know. You have to suss out their level of knowledge before a productive conversation can happen. It does no good to reference some complex work that they have never read, and providing a summary is not likely to meaningfully transfer knowledge to them, either.

To the extent that you do know a thing or two, your character, from the perspective of the other person, will be that you are a foreigner from the past, and your language is unlikely to be understood by the listener. Because modern newspapers, magazines, and websites must be written to the standard of a child. People are much more likely to recognize references from television shows than they are to books, because the typical American spends about three hours each day watching television.

According to Pew, the average number of books read is about five per year, but this is a bit distorted by the heavy readers. 54% read five or fewer. I write this blog with the assumption that you are in the category of 15% that read 20 or more books each year. And those quantitative measures of course mix in fans of pulp literature designed to be read quickly and in sequence.

The key problem with the modern scattershot education is that it makes it so that the people who have it have trouble coordinating with one another. They squabble and misunderstand each other continuously. They’re held together by weak, watered-down glue. They can’t handle competition from a unified opposition with a common high culture and reading of history. That doesn’t exist right now, but it could be reconstituted.

The promise of feminism going back centuries was that women had been denied opportunities to become scientists, engineers, physicians, and executives, and that by giving them opportunities, they would change the recognized nature of the female animal. The idea was that women could transcend biological and cultural limitations on them, permitting them to become like the best of men, except with the added capacity of lactation and live birth.

The Atlantic, which was once considered one of America’s leading intellectual magazines, has taken to rewriting press releases from the electronic brothel / concubinage clearing house Seeking Arrangement. In it, it claims that over 1,000 prostitutes signed up for their service from New York University alone — a school with a total annual undergraduate population of around 22,000. While those numbers may or may not be true, if it’s in any way accurate, it’s a demonstration of the implosion of the feminist narrative.

The various feminist tribes find themselves caught between the speculative-capitalist hope that women can be made as productive, innovative, and long-laboring as men traditionally have been (without cannibalizing the male workforce) and the polymorphous-perverse story that ‘sex work’ is glorious and high-status. This is not actually the first time that concubines & prostitutes have been high status in the West, but the dynamic is unique.

Families who sent their daughters to universities at great expense presumably didn’t do so in the hopes that they would be turned out like a truck stop pimp. A motel pimp can turn your daughter out for free, without the need to charge a family hundreds of thousands of dollars like NYU does.

Given that the Atlantic has taken to republishing press releases for an automated internet pimp without even charging them the typical rates that they do for native advertising, it’s interesting about how the magazine vacillates between glorifying women who sacrifice their sexuality at the altar of career, and the similar attempt to portray sexuality-as-career. Blaming student loans for the free decisions of the daughters of the middle class, who were supposedly learning judgment and discernment at university in return for those loan-provided tuition fees, is nonsensical — especially when many parents supplement loans with their own savings, in the hopes of advancing the station of their children through the mechanism of the university.

The notion motivating those loans is that the university is supposed to build character and train discernment. Obviously, it’s failing at that goal.

The story is getting fuzzy, in part because it is essentially illegal to criticize it openly in the United States. Criticizing feminism openly is essentially an invitation for a lawsuit or termination.

Because open debate on the topic is barred, the promoters of the ideology never experience the stress that comes from dealing with contrary positions. Feminists of past centuries had to overcome substantial resistance. There is still resistance, but it’s not the open kind — instead, advocates of egalitarianism only hear affirmations.

So, what are the good and beautiful people supposed to think? They are supposed to say that women must become doctors, business leaders, and engineers, but if they choose to become prostitutes, that is also a goal worthy of enormous support from every governmental and corporate institution in the land. It’s super if you become a dentist, but it’s A-OK if you become a hooker, also.

It isn’t so much that the concept of the university is a bad idea. It’s just that what the university has become in the United States has departed from anything which might be recognized as a university in past times.

Most parents see universities today as places that prepare their children for ‘careers’ which in previous times might have been called vocations. The actual methods by which masters taught apprenticeships vocations have been largely made illegal or otherwise out-competed by various subsidies from federal and state governments. University education and vocational education have been conflated for at least the past century, even before the laws that made it more challenging to enforce apprenticeship contracts, dating back to the 1930s.

Professors are ill-equipped to provide vocational training because of the way that markets function. Markets are eternally calibrating to  real-world conditions. If the market participants do not continue calibrating their operations to the conditions of the real world, they are pushed out of the market by stronger hands. Professors, especially when they are insulated from competition, have little incentive to match what they teach to the conditions of reality.

Universities were, traditionally, places mostly for the preservation of tradition, and the inculcation of historical teaching to students. They were not primarily seen as job-prep institutions. They were necessarily small-scale institutions, because one-to-one and one-to-few tutelage was the core purpose.

Many states, with the US being an exceptionally passionate example, have attempted to transform the university into moral-formation institutions, and later into high-grade-job-prep institutions. The US in particular has failed to achieve its goals in transforming universities into effective training centers for job-prep. The tradition-inculcation-goal was abandoned throughout the West in 1968, so the current versions of the universities can’t be criticized for failing to reach that goal.

So, in the US, how could you make universities irrelevant, whereas today they’re seen as guarantors of middle class jobbery?

Financially, they’re close to unassailable — colleges with state support have enormous resources that they can use to crush any competitor. While it matters that they crush the lives of many of the people who fall for their sales pitches, in the short term, it doesn’t matter, because the primary customers are not the same people who undergo the experience. The students of 1968 are paying for the education of the classes of 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 — they may have witnessed the apocalypse, but they have not seen its aftermath, except perhaps from a Tom Wolfe novel.

The answer is not to aim for the class of 1968 — which the current university-administrators do perfectly, and must do, to fulfill their fiduciary duties — but to the class of 2048. You have to think very hard about what the children of the next generation are going to have to deal with, and ignore all the controversies of the present, because they’re not going to be relevant to the people alive in the future. Most of the issues of today will be irrelevant in a few decades, because most of the pressing public issues of today concern people who will be dead in a few decades.

The current version of the university can be made irrelevant only by focusing on what those people in 2048, who haven’t been born yet, will need.