College Is Making Students Less Patriotic?
A study depicted how divided students are on American values, leading many to believe colleges promote making students less patriotic.
Historic illiteracy is leading American students to reject the constitution, capitalism, and pride in their country. While many colleges do still teach history, the focus has veered toward the vilification of the nation’s founders and teaching young adults that they cannot overcome the past. Teachers are heralding socialism and Marxist doctrine while students are encouraged to reject self-reliance, private ownership, and the American ideals of hard work. Now, a recent survey displays just how these lessons may have led students to become less patriotic.
Patriotism and having pride in one’s nation leads people toward more success. When students are proud of their homeland and wish to care for it they are more goal-oriented and optimistic about working toward the future. Newsweek recently conducted a survey which polled 2,000 students nationwide. Only 56% of young adults in college held positive patriotic views of America, which is lower than the national average. So are colleges making students less patriotic?
Students have admitted that they do not feel as if they can speak freely on campus and that freedom of speech is no longer protected by universities. Being patriotic can be detrimental to some, as nationalism, capitalism, and even the family unit have been decried as “racist.” The communist symbol, the hammer and sickle, is present on many college campuses. Students proudly wear it and reject capitalism as a form of “modern day slavery,” because they have been taught that the collective will benefit more from a socialist system than the current one.
Whether this is true or not is debatable, being that socialism has devastated countries and led to mass genocide. Yet, many college students know little to nothing of Pol Pot — the communist Cambodian leader who killed between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979, Joseph Stalin — the former Russian dictator who killed at least 20 million of his own people during his reign, or Mao Zedong — China’s socialist leader whose policies and ruthlessness killed 65 million of his own people. In addition, college students who feel less patriotic are also not taught much about refugees who are still fleeing socialist nations today, or how deeply the Venuzualian crises are tied to their communist totalitarian state.
Instead many colleges teach that socialism can be perfected and executed properly if done through the democratic process. This completely overlooks the fact that Hitler won over the majority of people in his country and they supported his efforts. Germans flew Nazi flags while millions of Jewish people were enslaved and killed. Instead of working to improve the downfalls of capitalism, anti-American sentiments have been taught on college campuses. Marxism, itself, has entered classrooms for decades. In 1989 The New York Times released a piece called, “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges.” Since then patriotic sentiment has been slowly phased out in favor of socialist teachings that focus on “inequities” and “racism” in America instead of the millions of people who have been slaughtered by this opposing system.
Based on this alone, many have already concluded that college is swaying students to be less patriotic. As universities teach that the nation is “racist” and self-reliance is harmful to others, the rustic American ideals of private ownership, freedom, family, faith, and self-governance are being vilified. This may be one of the reasons that college enrollment is down. Parents are tired of seeing their children turned against the very country that people flee to when socialist nations turn deadly.
