What our kids sit under is not just bad philosophy but watered down, to boot. It’s like the row of queens in The Magician’s Nephew who, as you walk the line from start to end, diminish by degree. Dumbed-down Derrida and Foucault is the worst. 

You’re sending Johnny off to college and keeping your fingers crossed. You’ve heard the statistics about kids losing their faith at university; you believe the price tag is way out of proportion to the product; you know he’ll be paying loans off till he’s 40. But it’s a testimony to the power of tradition and cultural inertia that you’re going ahead with it anyway.

If that’s how it is to be, let’s at least be prepared for his Thanksgiving visit home, when he’ll remark over turkey that America’s a genocidal country that deserves to be destroyed. Or his Christmas visit, when he’ll educate you to say “Happy holidays” and not “Merry Christmas.” Or spring vacation, when he’ll declare his true Mother to be Earth.

Between the day you drove off campus waving bye-bye in late August and the chilly autumn morning he showed up on your back doorstep packing the freshman 15, here’s what academia pumped into his brain as you were busy writing checks: 

Once upon a time people were ignorant and gullible and had a Faith in God and Church. That was called the Middle Ages, and good riddance to them. Then came the Enlightenment, so-called, because people believed in Reason now, and traded faith in God for faith in man’s ability to seek and find true knowledge. But now we know better, that there is no truth, that there are only truths, and that your truth is yours and my truth is mine, so let’s just “coexist.” (Bookstore bumper stickers are half off today!)

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