Monday, March 2, 2009

More on Where Our Schools go Wrong
  EdukShun piece by Warner Todd Huston

U.S. colleges are demanding. That’s right they are sternly demanding. You see, they are all upset that the Japanese government is not promoting study abroad for its citizens and they are demanding that the Japanese government get more of its citizens to pony up the cash for a U.S. college degree and if the people won’t do it, why these U.S. colleges demand that the government do it in their stead.

And this demand proves once again just how unAmerican U.S. colleges are.

On February 26, the Japan Times published a story on a junket to the island nation by the hectoring U.S. colleges where these demands were made.

In a bid to stop the dramatic decline in Japanese studying in the United States, representatives of U.S. colleges and universities met Wednesday with education minister Ryu Shionoya to demand that Japan improve efforts to promote study abroad.

These grasping college representatives were upset with the Japanese government. Since 1997, it appears, Japanese students going abroad have dropped 30 percent. It seems that Japan has fallen behind other Pacific Rim nations in students studying in the U.S.

So, U.S. colleges are stomping about Japan with their hands out to the Japanese government.

A group representing 19 U.S. states and private universities asked Shionoya to increase funds for undergraduate scholarships, improve the credit transfer system, introduce September admissions and create a category for those who have studied abroad in Japan’s statistical database.

Yes, like the good Europeans they are, these petulant and oh, so entitled college officials imagine that government should “fix” this “problem.“

It appears that the “problem” is that in greater numbers Japanese students are finding their own colleges and universities more attractive than U.S. schools. And, instead of trying to understand why that might be and, perhaps, attempting to sell their product in a better way, what are these arrogant “educators” expecting? They are expecting government to fix it for them. They are looking for government programs and handouts.

This is as unAmerican an attitude as it gets. But that is where our useless schools have arrived. They don’t care a whit about what they are selling. They expect, they demand and they assume that merely because they exist, they should be given. They see no reason to earn.

It is my fervent wish that Japanese students and the Japanese government gives a cold shoulder to these anti-intellectual, anti-American schools. It is further my hope that they begin to fail and close their doors by the hundreds. For if this is the lesson that our schools are teaching students, foreign and domestic, these “schools” are not serving their purpose.

American universities should not be teaching the European concept of nobleese oblige and the communist idea that government should be the one making these decisions. Government is not the “fix.“ If American colleges aren’t teaching subjects worthy of an engaged student and are not offering things that attract the best and brightest, then these colleges are unworthy of new students. They don’t deserve government largess, they deserve elimination.

So, I hope that Bob Soni of the International Student Network, Naomi Baldwin of the University of Central Missouri and all the good little fellow travelers that joined them on their nice little junket find nothing but failure in their quest. Let us hope for the sake of our students and Japan’s that these people come home with empty hands.

It is no less than what they deserve.

Warner Todd Huston

Posted by Warner Todd Huston on 3/2/09

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