

NPR Syndrome - DanielBMarkham
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/10/npr-syndrome.php

======
wyclif
_We're teaching people to put on the affectation of being smart, of having the
right opinions, being upset at the right things, listening to the right radio
stations, hanging out with the right crowd -- with actually being smart._

I think you meant _without_ rather than _with_ , and I believe your
argumentation could be cleaned up a lot. Overall though, I agree that there
has been a loss of content in liberal education. One can observe this in any
English or Philosophy department at liberal universities, where it's de rigeur
to assign a commentary on Plato rather than read his writings, or instead of
becoming familiar with the political and religious views of Lady Jane Grey
herself, we read a discourse by someone invested in enforcing gender tallying
and political correctness. Not exactly a new observation, but one confirmed by
books such as _The Closing of the American Mind._

------
parfe
Care to include any examples? You wrote a long winded rant without any
substance. I took a look around the <http://www.npr.org/sections/news/> and
didn't find anything that came close to your straw man.

Meanwhile your characterization of <http://www.npr.org/music/> is a complete
joke. Just glance at the categories of music NPR covers in the various colored
tabs.

I suppose a kind reading of your writing would be that you misunderstand what
you are hearing when your local classical station syndicates NPR content.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
The point is that we listen to NPR because it is a way of posturing, not that
the music is only classical.

The argument is about cargo cult intellectualism. NPR is great for what it is
-- but the discussion here is about the way it fits into society, not the
types of music it offers.

I'm not sure exactly what your question is. Am I to provide examples of social
posturing and signalling? Aren't they fairly well-understood phenomenon?

~~~
parfe
You made the claim NPR Syndrome exists yet provide no examples besides hearing
classical music discussed and a made up straw-man news story about Global
Warming and puppies.

Then tell me I should just assume NPR Syndrome exists because you need it to
for the rest of your piece to hold up? I don't think so. Especially when
finding examples hosted on NPR's own website should be trivial.

Not to mention your vomit inducing caricature from Good Will Hunting
generalized to a liberal arts education; reminds me of people claiming Steve
Jobs and Bill Gates represent great role models for college freshman to follow
and go drop out to strike out on their own.

You basically set up the article just so that you can argue against what you
believe is the liberal intellectual poser who only exists in your head because
it fits your political world view.

------
_pius
I like much of your writing Daniel, but I found this piece to be way off the
mark.

You're conflating political liberalism and liberal arts ... with disastrous
results.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Thanks for the comment.

Can you elaborate? Like most mistakes, the person making it is always the last
to see it.

My point was that the facade that a liberal arts education brings is many (not
all) times associated with a set of behaviors: NPR, certain websites, ability
to reason about economics, etc. My point is that to most people dropping 80K
or more on an education, the only thing they're getting is a pre-canned set of
attitudes and opinions, which is not supposed to be the goal of a liberal arts
education at all. So yes, I am conflating them, but that's by design, not
accident. Perhaps I should have stated my thesis clearer?

~~~
rhizome
_Perhaps I should have stated my thesis clearer?_

You could get a good jump on this by excising all of the sentences where you
talk about what you're _not_ doing.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
The problem here is that there is a larger political argument, which I
acknowledge but really don't want to participate in, which goes something like
_college only exists to indoctrinate young liberals._ As you can see from one
of the other commenters on this article, people take it like that whether I
mean it that way or not.

I find this statement to be true, but an oversimplification, and it's not my
point at all. I think what we're really seeing is a sociological phenomenon:
teaching people to appear as if they've learned something instead of actually
teaching them anything. I find this deeper point to be much more important.
You might find the same thing at right-leaning universities -- perhaps.
(Although there is an interesting inverse relationship on the right. Perhaps
at right-leaning universities you would find students who pose as tolerant and
worldly yet have no idea why they do so? It bears study.)

Not an excuse for not doing a rewrite, but I wanted to point out that there is
a fine line here, hence the "I'm not saying" text. (Still needs a rewrite.
Your point is well made. Thank you.)

------
pavel_lishin
Not particularly relevant, but I've stopped listening to NPR in fear that
Diane Rehm will come on and attempt to slowly murder me with her murder voice.

~~~
rhizome
It's called Spasmodic Dysphonia.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasmodic_dysphonia>

