America's Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses

As college costs soar through the roof-averaging above $31,000 a year for tuition, room & board-today's college students study adultery, genitalia, and Native American feminism. That's not a misprint.

Occidental College, located in Los Angeles, California, offers The Phallus, which covers a broad study on the relation "between the phallus and the penis, the meaning of the phallus, phallologocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the Jewish phallus, the Latino phallus, and the relation of the phallus and fetishism." Occidental, sadly, is not alone in offering completely disturbing and wacky courses.

Young America's Foundation brings you the worst of the worst-hundreds of courses researched, only 12 selected. We call it the Dirty Dozen: America's Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses. Following Occidental's number one spot are many other leading institutions devoted to "higher learning"-to wit, University of California-Los Angeles and its Queer Musicology. Students explore how "sexual difference and complex gender identities in music and among musicians have incited productive consternation" during the 1990s. Unless you want to become a singing pimp or prostitute, how does this class enrich your education?

Actually, that question can be asked for most of the course descriptions you are about to read, and the answer is the same throughout-how is it enriching or educational? Queer Musicology, mind you, does study "breakthrough" composers, one being "Pussy Tourette" (he/she is famous in the American drag queen composer world).

Instead of obsessing over Latino penises and dancing transgendereds, the third course on the Dirty Dozen takes a more wicked and murderous tone-admiration of communism. Amherst College in Massachusetts offers Taking Marx Seriously: "Should Marx be given another chance?" Students are asked to question if Marxism still has "credibility," while also inquiring if societies can gain new insights by "returning to [Marx's] texts." Coming to Marx's rescue, this course also states that Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot misapplied the concepts of Marxism. Apparently the 100-plus million that totalitarian regimes have murdered over the years is not enough for the Left to throw Marxism overboard?" But then again, we do have 6 billion people on earth. To leftists, what's a million murdered here and there?

Moving from murder to romance, do you think adultery is beautiful? Well, the University of Pennsylvania does. The school's Adultery Novel class reads a series of 19th and 20th century works about adultery and watches "several adultery films" in order to place adultery "into its aesthetic, social and cultural context" [emphasis mine]. UPENN even finds room for Marx in a course on marital infidelity, viewing trysts through "sociological descriptions of modernity, Marxist examinations of family" and "feminist work on the construction of gender."

Reminder: you're not reading a Saturday Night Live script, but a depiction of real college courses for which taxpayers, parents, and students pay.

Ever wonder what it is to be a "feminist new black man?" Do you even know what a "feminist new black man" looks like? It appears that Occidental College does. It offers Blackness, which elaborates on a "new blackness," "critical blackness," "post-blackness," and an "unforgivable blackness," which all combine to create a "feminist new black man."

Chances are that women will not come knocking at the "feminist new black man's" door. That's why Johns Hopkins University offers Mail Order Brides: Understanding the Philippines in Southeast Asian Context. Not only do you gain valuable and deep understanding of Filipino kinship and gender, but you learn how to import a wife, if need be.

You can catch the Dirty Dozen in its entirety by going here. Read up on "Native American Feminisms," "Cyberfeminism," "Whiteness," "Sex Change City," and much more. While these courses make us laugh-sometimes uncontrollably-they should bring us dismay.

Tuition's grown more than twice as fast as inflation over the last 30 years, indeed, faster than the costs of food, clothing, and shelter. Only one in four Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment, but more than half can name at least two family members of "The Simpsons." And as The Washington Post and The Chronicle of Higher Education report, only 31 percent of college grads can read and comprehend complex books, and 40 percent of college students need remedial work in math and English.

Are we really putting our educational resources to the best use? The growth of frivolous classes gobbles up tons of money and time and ignores scholarship from a conservative perspective. For instance, books and speeches from the late Milton Friedman and Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick are rarely studied in the classroom, yet leftist works and themes are prevalent in colleges nationwide. It may be a stretch, but I'd go out on a limb and say employers, family members, and friends would rather students understand economics, American history, and the role of government in a society rather than the differences between a Jewish and Latino phallus.

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More on the Australian science teaching disaster

Astronaut Andy Thomas has warned that primary schools are failing to inspire young students to study science and follow in his footsteps. "Students getting hands-on experience doing science experiments is not happening because of liability and safety issues," Dr Thomas said in his home town of Adelaide yesterday. "You have to plant the seeds in their minds, usually before they're aged 10 - before the seventh grade."

His comments follow a scathing review of the teaching of science in the nation's schools, with The Australian reporting that laboratory experiments are being squeezed out of classrooms by tight budgets and health and safety laws that require risk-assessments in some states.

While Dr Thomas did not excel at school in Adelaide, he sees science and maths teaching in primary school, and experiments in particular, as crucial to inspiring future scientists. "If you haven't sparked some interest before the seventh grade you have lost them, you ain't gonna get them," he said. His comments came as he was awarded an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of Adelaide, for his career as a research scientist.

University of Adelaide Vice-Chancellor James McWha backed Dr Thomas's call for better teaching. "Maths and science teaching in schools has been diluted," he said. "There has been a huge demand for engineers and scientists, and as a consequence not enough of them are going back into school teaching. "You need to get more scientists teaching, otherwise we're going to end up with a society which has a complex technology but doesn't understand it."

Dr Thomas's honorary doctorate goes with the first-class honours degree and PhD in mechanical engineering he earned while studying at the University of Adelaide in the 1970s. A specialist in high-speed drag and fluid dynamics, the young Dr Thomas was immediately hired by aircraft maker Lockheed, the maker of some of the US military's most revolutionary aircraft, including the stealth fighter. He later headed its flight sciences laboratory. In 1989 he went to work for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, and in 1992 he entered the astronaut training program. In 1996, he fulfilled a childhood dream by flying into space on board the space shuttle Endeavour. Dr Thomas, Australia's only astronaut, completed three shuttle missions and more than four months on the Russian Mir space station. He lives in Texas with his wife, NASA astronaut Shannon Walker, and works on the ergonomics of the next generation of spacecraft, which will go to the moon by 2020.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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