A reader who is also a student writes an impassioned indictment of what passes for education on campus today. It's a long letter, but every word is worth reading:

I have been skimming through some of your previous Cantwatch posts, and I have noticed a common thread. That is, that a liberal arts education is, all too often, practically useless (insert mitigating caveat here). As a current "student" of history and philosophy, I can only conclude you're right.

I have to post those little post-modernist sneer quotes around the word "student." Why? Because, in short, I'm not learning anything about history and philosophy, even at $10,000 a year (I'm an out-of-state tuition casualty). Sure, I go to the appropriately-titled classes: History, Philosophy. I show up, take my notes, take my tests, write my papers. I'm a straight-A student. Honor roll material. All that.

But in spite of all this, I'm not learning. I haven't actually been assigned Plato's Republic. Or Herodotus. Or the Gulag Archipelago. Oh, no. But I can tell you this: Islam is more inclusive than Christianity, and a lot easier on women to boot. I know it sounds crazy. But my Religion teacher says so, and he has some really snazzy theories to back that assertion up.

I think you know where I'm going with this. The bottom line is that no matter what class I take, the lesson is nearly always the same: all of my assumptions are untrue, and doubly so because I'm infected with the sickness of lousy social conditioning. The tragedy is that I'm a truly committed student, desperate to become an authority in my chosen field. Instead of being given an actual body of useful knowledge, reinforced by a demanding curriculum of scholarly training and research, all I'm being offered is an attitude, a stance, a socio-political posture, and the lie that by assuming it I will somehow become brilliant. None of this, of course, is actually informed by anything like a depth of learning. The actual content of my humanities courses is so much window dressing.

An example from my afore-mentioned religion course will be instructive. Our readings have included the following: excerpts from African tribal myths describing female genital mutilation; Malcolm X's hajj; a diary about the Holocaust; the Genesis story (with an emphasis on gender relations); an explication of the Hindu caste system from the Dhammapada; a native American vision quest (with an emphasis on the respect for the environment it entails); a biography of Gandhi during his anti-colonial days; the portion of the Vatican II documents that describe the reform of the Catholic church to a more "community centered" institution; the introduction to an influential Wiccan text by the high priestess Starhawk, describing the pillage of our idyllic matriarchal pre-history by war-like patriarchal tribesmen (my personal favorite); a work by Gutierrez on his transparently Marxist "liberation theology;" and on and on and on. We talk endlessly about false consciousness, Marx, social determinism, and the great race-class-gender triumvirate. We are finishing the semester with Silko's exceedingly bitter work, , about a young native American suffering from shell shock because of his foolish decision to fight in WWII (the "white man's war"), with special attention being paid to his ruminations about the double-dealing hypocrisy of all those "white whores" he slept with along the way. Oh, and how he doesn't resent the Japanese at all, but man those pale-faced Americans really pulled off some atrocities at Iwo Jima.

In essence, the pretense that this is a course in "the academic study of religion" is nothing short of a smokescreen. It could be taught in the English, Sociology, or Gender Studies departments every bit as easily, under a different title, and no one would ever know the difference. The reality of it is that we are engaged in a shameful little game of intellectual Simon Says with our professor. We strip-mine the texts for every pertinent word or symbol or turn of phrase, we plug it in to the Academic Theory of the Week Machine, and voila! We have our minds blown. Then, we regurgitate the conclusion on the test, all the while making pretend that these were our ideas all along, and that we are engaging in some kind of critical thinking exercise. In truth, we are simply replaying someone else's pre-recorded thought process, having been led through it by our professor step-by-step, and with a wink and a shrug passing it off as our own.

This is a travesty. There is not another student in that entire class with the inclination or the information to challenge the lecture content and see it for what it is. The other students I talk to know there's something missing, something simply wrong, but they can't quite put their fingers on it. They do agree on one thing--the class itself is a worthless enterprise, and if that's the kind of consensus the school is after I'm not sure what all the fuss over the importance of an education is all about. And so it goes in nearly all my classes. I just sit there, frustrated, trying to sift through the politics to find the parts that will help me advance as a scholar, and I'm redirected time and again into the blind alley that is revisionism, deconstruction, and every other fashionable triviality that characterizes the current university environment.

Parents of America, wake up!