<p>“stay away from political discussions”? Why, are his/her beliefs and convictions so shaky that merely discussing them will lead to their loss?</p>
<p>At Vassar I had a prof for East Asian studies who made no effort to hide his hatred of Communism. It was a bit of a joke amongst his students, given our subject matter which obviously covered communism rather extensively. We just learned to deal with his obvious bias.</p>
<p>Hey, the good news for college students exposed “to all that bias” is that once they graduate to the real world they’ll find absolutely no bias at all!</p>
<p>Bay, I said “The kid who comes in with a fixed mindset and refuses to consider other perspectives.” There are great conservative students who are able to interpret and analyze other viewpoints and still cling to their own, in the end. Clearly Jindal was one, whether or not I agree with his politics. I’d say there are plenty of knee-jerk liberal students, too. And they have the same responsibility.</p>
<p>“At Vassar I had a prof for East Asian studies who made no effort to hide his hatred of Communism.” - Nice to hear that brave people still exist, not many though, actually very endagered species. “Obvious bias” - this is exactly what I am talking about. Apparently, discussions were going on without any kind of idea what it is, the fact alone that 150 mlns were killed obviously means nothing whatsoever.<br>
This is exact reason why we strongly advise our kid to stay away…because of complete disregard to historical facts…</p>
<p>Bay, without having to regurgitate the liberal viewpoints of their profs. That they remain conservative may speak to higher critical thinking skills, as opposed to rote memory or indoctrination.</p>
<p>Your assumption about rote memory and indoctrination isn’t very flexible, it seems to me. See what I mean about how it’s always the profs who get the blame? </p>
<p>Critical thinking is about questioning assumptions. Not assuming, eg, that the conservative kid, barraged by liberals on all sides, is forced to regurgitate.</p>
<p>You can find a lot of evil acts committed outside of communism in East Asian history and the non-communists weren’t always the good guys, ask the native Taiwanese.</p>
<p>However, relaying the facts would allow us to draw our own conclusions. What made us laugh was that he would say things like “communists are evil”. Teach us the history and let us figure that out. Word was his parents were killed in the revolution, don’t know if that was true, he was American.</p>
<p>I’d say the same about a professor who taught that communism saved the Chinese people and capitalism was evil. I never had one of those though.</p>
<p>What the students learn is not always what the professors or teachers intend. I learned to be a leftist by growing up in Texas and being fed ridiculous right-wing rhetoric that I decided could be easily dismissed, and I suppose that many students could end up to the right if they are exposed to left-wing rhetoric they find to be ridiculous. </p>
<p>My wife grew up in the People’s Republic of China and came to the US as a staunch anti-communist, in part because her father had been put in a labor camp and died an early death during the Cultural Revolution and in part because her family was tainted by accusations against her father and she was bullied continuously as a result. But after years of living in the US with me, and particularly after years of listening to the rhetoric from the US right (the monied right, as she pays no attention to the religious right), which she finds preposterous and disturbing, she said she finally understood what no Chinese communist teacher or professor had ever been able to convey to her – that Marx had made many good points and there were virtues to communism and socialism, though of course she still believes the Chinese implementation is significantly flawed and that the Cultural Revolution was insane and a catastrophe.</p>
<p>‘I told my younger kid, stay away from any political discussions, do not participate, they are all very very biased. I believe that we did a bit better with the younger one after knowing what is going on from the older’s experience.’</p>
<p>Gosh, you must be very insecure about your beliefs and what you have taught your children if you feel the need to tell them to stay away from political discussion and not to participate. Why even bother sending them to college?</p>
<p>Both of my kids have had professors of various political preferences from the truly extreme to the not much at all. Maybe they are luckier than most.</p>
<p>^ Stay away because they are “biased,” but being conservative is not a “bias?”</p>
<p>Fly under the radar becase your views are not important? Sheesh. What a message to give a college kid. Why not tell him to learn to carefully and intelligently describe his position? To hear out naysayers and have convincing, well-considered arguments to the contrary? Not opinions, not mom’s or dad’s politics, but your own, shored up by some academic depth?</p>
<p>Btw, what misconceptions some people have of what U life is really like. They must think it’s all a bunch of Bolsheviks trying to take away your mind.</p>
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<p>I agree. I didn’t write my post very well as I was on my IPhone.</p>
<p>The liberal college student doesn’t have his assumptions questioned as much as the conservative student. It is much easier to be a good student when you agree with everything your prof says. Students who are forced (and yes, they are at times instructed to take a position assigned by the prof) to argue viewpoints not in line with their own, I do believe benefit much more. I think profs ought to require liberal students to argue the conservative viewpoint half the time. It would create better understanding in our society.</p>
<p>Well I agree with y’all. Public policy should be driven by whichever Party at the extreme that does the better job of convincing citizens that its unilaterism is the right choice for every citizen.</p>
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<li><p>(Re #49) Well, the Cultural Revolution WAS insane and a catastrophe, pretty much regardless of your political views, unless your political position is essentially being a 16 year-old anarchist punk. I don’t know anyone in any position on a recognizable political spectrum who still romanticizes the Cultural Revolution, and that’s been true for 30 years.</p></li>
<li><p>I remember my children asking what Communism was one day when we were driving to school. So I started a long explanation (all my explanations are long), in the course of which I mentioned the slogan “To each according to his need; from each according to his ability.” My younger child picked up on that immediately: “I believe that! I think I am probably a Communist!” (Don’t worry, I also told them about Stalinism, and the relationship between Communism and contempt for individual rights. And he hasn’t been a Communist since he was 10 or so.)</p></li>
<li><p>I was educated at a conservative prep school (where my crusty Old Exonian 7th grade English teacher had me reading George Jackson’s letters from Soledad Prison and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice) then at two universities generally thought to be bastions of academic liberalism. Practically all of my college and law school faculty mentors were right of center, although I had plenty of teachers who weren’t, and I never was. My best academic friend from college is now a right-wing public intellectual. On my law review, I was trained and promoted by a future Bush federal court appointee, who himself had been nurtured by a hard-left anti-death-penalty activist, and when I chose a protegee it was a conservative accountant from the South. Of course, the labels tell about 5% of the story; intellectually, there was a great deal of compatibility among us, and we basically loved and respected one another.</p></li>
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<p>That is a wonderful account. It is where I’d like to see us all be.</p>
<p>Re-education camps … that’s what we need, camps big enough to hold every last Democrat in the country (since their thinking is fundamentally flawed according to Rush and many other pundits). We just need the political will to implement it.</p>
<p>NewHope
You need to relate your posts to college or you will be punished. :)</p>
<p>That prof didn’t limit his hatred of communists to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. </p>
<p>In high school we were taught about all kinds of political and economic systems. I don’t recall a prof ever saying s/he preferred one, or one was “evil” or one was “great”. We simply learned the underlying philosophy, looked at nations that had implemented them to some degree and what happened, compared and contrasted certain points, etc. </p>
<p>One thing such an approach does not do is force the idea that the US version of capitalism is the only right one, though that was a conclusion many of us did come to.</p>
<p>“On my law review, I was trained and promoted by a future Bush federal court appointee, who himself had been nurtured by a hard-left anti-death-penalty activist, and when I chose a protegee it was a conservative accountant from the South.”</p>
<p>This is something that top law schools do very, very well. (I’m not saying non-top law schools don’t – I just don’t have much experience with them.)</p>
<p>“The liberal college student doesn’t have his assumptions questioned as much as the conservative student. It is much easier to be a good student when you agree with everything your prof says.”</p>
<p>Hogwash. </p>
<p>Having a Masters in Political Science from Syracuse Maxwell School and a Masters in Public Policy from U of Chicago, I was questioned just as hard regardless of the leanings of my professors (which the majority at Chicago were disciples of Milton Friedman.)</p>
<p>You know, Jindal is obviously a smart fella. Everything in his background suggests that. His conservatism is likely real (I haven’t looked into his heart ;)), but I have trouble imagining that he’s really comfortable with the wackos he has the state funding. It’s one thing to believe in the free market of ideas; it’s another to facilitate the state funding some of the more wild ones.</p>
<p>My d’s often asked me about communism in Russia, and I noted how Stalin’s rise was facilitated by a major and prolonged war, funded by the U.S. and Britain, that essentially left Russia’s economy in shambles, and made it possible for a ruthless, awful dictator to take the reins. Communism in Russia was thus never even a possibility thereafter. Then they lost 20 million people, including a huge portion of their young men, and virtually their entire industrial infrastructure in World War II, and defeated Hitler in what was in my mind probably the single most important event of the 20th Century - the Battle of Stalingrad (without which we might all be speaking German today - those of us who would still be alive.) I would tell them this not to defend Communism (I wouldn’t), but to make sure they understood that there is more to history than political soundbites.</p>