I remember how it was -- JR
Federal Student Loan Program Is Losing Billions
In 2004, Barack Obama was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate in Illinois. Speaking before a group of students at Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield, Illinois, he voiced an inspirational quote:
“We have an obligation and a responsibility to be investing in our students and our schools. We must make sure that people who have the grades, the desire and the will, but not the money, can still get the best education possible.”
He also offered a specific policy proposal to achieve that lofty goal, promising it would save money for U.S. taxpayers:
“We would save $4.5 billion annually if we made all student loans directly by the government,” Obama told students and faculty members at Lincoln Land Community College.
In 2010, President Obama followed through on his 2004 promise. Under the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, the federal government effectively took over the student loan business. Now, instead of guaranteeing loans made by private lenders, the federal government would directly loan billions of dollars to American students seeking a college education.
The Promise Becomes a Penalty
As of 2020, the U.S. government has loaned over $1.3 trillion to U.S. students. If Barack Obama had been right, after 10 years, the federal government would have saved $45 billion. Instead, the Wall Street Journal reports, the U.S. government’s direct student-loan business has cost taxpayers $435 billion.
“Penny wise but pound foolish” is the saying that best describes the outcome of President Obama’s promise.
The WSJ article is behind a paywall, but Brad Polombo of the Foundation for Economic Education excerpts some key passages from the article and explains why the government’s “investment” in students has gone so badly:
“The Education Department, with the help of two private consultants, looked at $1.37 trillion in student loans held by the government at the start of the year,” the Journal reports. “Their conclusion: Borrowers will pay back $935 billion in principal and interest. That would leave taxpayers on the hook for $435 billion.”
“After decades of no-questions-asked lending, the government is realizing that it has a pile of toxic debt on its books,” the report continues. “The government lends more than $100 billion each year to students to cover tuition at more than 6,000 colleges and universities. It ignores factors such as credit scores and field of study, and it doesn’t analyze whether students will earn enough after graduating to cover their debt.”
Think about it like this. In the free market, banks do their best to ensure they lend money to prospective borrowers likely to repay the loan, yielding a net positive return on their investment. Banks that do this successfully stay in business, while those who repeatedly misjudge their borrowers go bust.
Better still, the interests of taxpayers are better protected by that arrangement because the risk associated with losses is kept in the private sector.
A Darker Side to the Story
The WSJ article also recognizes that the U.S. government’s role in making direct student loans directly contributes to the soaring cost of college.
With the federal takeover of student lending, President Obama’s promise of savings for taxpayers almost immediately backfired as greedy university administrators realized they could crank college tuition higher. With Uncle Sam acting as a third-party payer, students have little incentive to make prudent financial decisions about their education, which provided a green light for tuition inflation to soar. Tuition costs have shot up at both for-profit and non-profit institutions whose students have access to federally funded student financial aid programs.
That sounds very familiar. The same factors of government regulation, subsidies and other interventions in health care are responsible for making health care similarly unaffordable for many Americans. And as with health care, much of the extra cash provided by the federal government has gone toward the growth of administrative bloat.
It also creates the situation in which the U.S. government has to borrow more to fund its direct student-loan program because of the rising cost of tuition. That in turn increases the size of the government’s losses when the loans go bad. It’s an ugly, toxic mess that can only get worse without reform.
What Reform Is Needed
A number of politicians are now calling for student loan relief by having the next president forgive up to $50,000 of their federal student loan debt with an executive order. Unfortunately, all that will do is guarantee the losses that U.S. taxpayers will be on the hook for paying without doing anything to fix a broken system. It would also unfairly benefit higher- over lower-income earners.
Truly fixing the system will require the government to act to force bloated academic institutions to return the ill-gotten proceeds of their administrators’ greed. If a student who attended their institution becomes delinquent and defaults on their federal student loan debt, they should have to return to Uncle Sam a significant percentage of the money they collected from the student.
After all, if they’re not willing to guarantee the value of the college educations they provide, how much is that education really worth? If they’re not willing to repay, the U.S. government would be within its rights to cut them off from participation in all other federal funding programs. One way or another, the government could get back the money its owed, without sticking honest taxpayers with the bill.
At the same time, the federal government needs to get out of its money-losing student-loan business and return it to the private sector, where it belongs. Only by doing so can it protect the interests of all Americans and close the door on President Obama’s penny wise but pound foolish investment in education.
https://blog.independent.org/2020/12/17/federal-student-loan-program-is-losing-billions/?omhide=true
Mixed race wife of Eton teacher sacked over 'toxic masculinity' lecture slams the school's 'wokery' - saying 'we're the sort of diverse family woke-ness is supposedly defending'It began, remembers Rachel Knowland, with a Viking raid. Her husband, the sacked Eton English master Will Knowland, had recommended the classic Norse saga 'The Long Ships' to students at the school's Huxley Book Club. He thought its buccaneering young hero Orm Tostesson might fire their teenage imaginations and they'd learn some history, geography and anthropology along the way.
But Knowland was rapped over the knuckles when a colleague complained, not about the book itself, but about the The New Statesman magazine review he'd added to pique their interest. 'A banquet of adventure by sea and land, with man-size helpings of battle and murder, robbery and rape,' it enthused.
'Weirdly the objection was not to the idea that historically Vikings raped, pillaged, and murdered,' says Rachel, 34. 'It was about the word "man-sized"'. Laura Bates from the Everyday Sexism Project [a charity which fights sexism] had just given a talk at Eton and apparently Will's action in disseminating a quote describing something as 'man-sized' was insensitive.
'Looking back, it should have been a gigantic red flag. At the time I thought well, some people might want radical change, but what boy doesn't like a book about Vikings - the open sea, adventure, treasure, dragon boats.
'Will thought he was doing his job, instilling a love of literature. It hadn't occurred to him he was committing a micro-aggression.'
'For us that was the start. Since then a strain of misandrist thinking has taken hold of the popular idea of what it is to be a man. Eton is becoming a place where it is not OK to diverge from that - it's heresy just to be a traditional boy.'
This incident occurred after regime change came to Eton in 2015 with new Head Master Simon Henderson or Trendy Hendy as he's known for his adherence to progressive ideologies. Depending on your point of view, he has either dragged Britain's most famous school into the 21st century or turned it into a cathedral of woke.
Knowland was dismissed in the fallout from a contrarian lecture in which he questioned the dogma of toxic masculinity. The 35-year-old father of five was suspended in September and lost his job on appeal earlier this month. The affair has triggered a crisis at Eton and a war of words about wokery.
It's also seen the teacher labelled a misogynist and his lecture, the Patriarchy Paradox, derided as antediluvian, horrifying his wife. She says: 'Will is stoic and loyal and kind - he embodies everything that is admirable about masculinity. He's not a thug who doesn't value all parts of being human. Maybe he is not a shiny penny on the outside but he is a brilliant, natural teacher, a supportive husband and the father of three daughters who adore him.
'He created that lecture because he sees the rising suicide rate in young men. We, as a society, are overwhelmed by the idea that men are toxic, useless and unnecessary and telling that to teenage boys on repeat is dangerous. Will was not trying to radicalise young men but he was - in the richest of Eton traditions - asking for fearless discussion.
'He could teach boys how to game exams and jump through hoops for high marks but that's not all there is to education. He has always believed that there has to be a bit of grit in the oyster to create a pearl. People may think he's been reckless by standing up for what he believes but I agree with him that if Eton falls to wokery, with its history and all its eminent Old Etonians, then most places don't have a hope.'
It's a full throated defence of her husband, given that his principles have cost the couple dear. With children aged from 14 years to 10 months, Rachel stays at home and Knowland is the family breadwinner. They have lived in the five bedroom detached grace and favour house which comes with the Eton job for eight years. Now they and Sienne, 14, Amelie, 12, Jude 10, Cecily, seven, and 10 month old Gabriel, their Canary Mastiff Ava and three cats must quit.
Rachel says they cannot stay in a community in which allies have turned up on their doorstep with Brownies and sympathy while Simon Henderson's supporters have cold shouldered them. 'Some people think we should have just gone quietly for the sake of the school's reputation,' she admits. 'But it is the school's reputation which is at stake, this is bigger than Will.'
She goes on: 'Eton is a world all of its own, a smoothly run machine. It's like the Borg.' She's referencing the cybernetic organisms from Star Trek who have a hive mind called The Collective. 'You have to assimilate. It's not for everyone but Will is no renegade. At least he wasn't until the invisible lines of acceptable thought were crossed.'
Under the previous Head Master Tony Little, himself a scholarship boy, Knowland's career flourished, according to his wife. Then Simon Henderson was appointed and constructed a kind of parallel curriculum for teaching Inclusivity and Diversity which was superimposed upon all of Eton's famous Boarding Houses and each of its academic departments.
Rachel reveals how, in her husband's own English department for example, there was an internal row over the hijack of display boards to promote the political manifesto of LGBTQ+ pressure group Stonewall rather than exploring the issue in a relevant way, through the extensive body of brilliant literature devoted to it.
Then there are the now familiar stories about boys being obliged to 'come out as straight' and stick a cushion up their jumper and imagine they have a baby in their womb, in gender identity workshops. So too, The Black Lives Matter movement was embraced at Eton with Prefects (known as Pop) obliged to wear waistcoats in BLM livery and talk of flying the BLM flag over the school's gatehouse.
It was against this hyper-sensitised ultra politically correct backdrop that Knowland uploaded his intentionally polemical online lecture. Rachel says after the initial complaint he offered four times to amend it, and asked Simon Henderson for mediation and discussion. Instead, she says, the Equalities Act was 'weaponised' against him. And it was the fear of this, not a streak of stubbornness, which made him keep the lecture available for public view on his YouTube channel Knowland Knows. 'How else,' she asks, 'could Will defend himself?'
She has had his back since they were at school together. They met at 13, started dating at 14 and had their first baby when Rachel was 19 and Knowland was 20, in their second year of university. Rachel was reading Classics and English Literature at King's in London and Will was studying English Literature at nearby UCL. They were married between child three and child four by their old history teacher in the chapel of their former school.
Rachel is a stunning mixed race woman with Anglo-Caribbean heritage and a talent for singing funk and R and B which got her as far as the semi finals of Britain's Got Talent in 2012. Knowland is from a Suffolk farming family and is a fully qualified personal trainer and a dedicated weightlifter. 'When people learn he's a teacher, they automatically assume he's a PE teacher - or they think he's a bouncer,' says his wife affectionately.
(Even this led to friction at Eton when he tried to introduce strength training for boys on the College rugby team. 'I think if he had been a rower that would have been OK. Rowing and cricket are what they want, rugby will one day go the same way as boxing.')
Asked to describe their relationship, Rachel says opposites attract, he's an optimist, she's a pessimist; she's emotional, he's phlegmatic. What they share however, is a personal sense of resilience which is these days far from universal.
Rachel's mother is from the Caribbean island of Aruba, her father from Norfolk. She grew up in a single parent household and won an assisted place at a private school in the the first year girls were admitted. Her husband arrived there on a full academic scholarship two years later, bribed to do well in his exams with a pair of roller skates.
In addition the couple are the parents of an autistic child which means Rachel could face multiple diversity and inclusion transgressions every day, if she perceived them as such. 'I would have been horrified if my own education had been hindered by a group of safe space police trying to wrap me up in cotton wool. As an adult I find it rather patronising to be told how I should feel about certain words or ideas,' she says.
'Actually, we are the kind of diverse family Eton's woke-ness is supposedly defending. We have benefitted from the social mobility offered by education, we are a mixed race couple, we have a child with autism, but the people who shout loudest about diversity are not the ones who would want to hang out with me,' she says wryly.
Then she tells a jaw-dropping story about being offered a golliwog for sale while browsing in an antique shop soon after moving to the town. (To be clear, the shop is nothing to do with Eton College.)
'I declined and the shopkeeper said "I have a great collection out of the back if you don't like that one?" I just thought silly old sod and have borne him no ill well ever since. Yet here we are wondering if, for example, when Eton decolonises its syllabus, we will have to stop boys reading Othello or To Kill a Mocking Bird, in case it makes them feel uncomfortable, instead of giving them the resilience necessary to overcome racist attitudes which, although offensive, can't really hurt you. When you start, where do you stop?
'I see a similar disconnect from reality with what's been done to Will by Eton in terms of the feminist zealotry at work. Someone has been so upset by his lecture they're willing to watch him be sacked and his whole family turned out of their house. The kicker is that whoever complained doesn't even work with girls, they've chosen to teach boys instead of teaching at a co-ed school or a girls school. If it's about lifting women up, where's the integrity?'
It's a very different and toxic climate from their early days at the school. Knowland had taught in both a state comprehensive and the private sector when he applied for the job in 2012. Rachel, initially trepidatious, says: 'Eton was so refreshing. I was blown out of the water by it, a welcoming community and personable pupils. As for Will, he respected the institution and what it stands for, its academic freedom and the fact it's a bulwark of British culture. That is very potent and Will always felt as if he were a custodian of what Eton represents.'
Now she's left wondering if they ever completely fitted in. 'Will doesn't own a pair of red corduroy trousers,' she jokes, adding that their children - who used to tease their Dad he looked like Batman in his black Eton robes - are not privately educated (other than one who recently moved to an independent school.)
Knowland plans to take Eton to an Employment Tribunal. They will survive financially through his tutoring which, given the leap to remote learning in 2020, is increasingly in demand. Rachel is looking ahead to finally forging a career of her own, something which has always taken second place to raising their children. The public judgements made about her choice have proved hard for her to hear.
'Some people think a traditional family set up is archaic and awful if it's a choice freely made, why is it seen as a prison?' she asks. 'Some of the traditional feminine choices are not the ones feminists value, in fact they denigrate them. I don't belong to a monolith of women. We are not homogenous. Equality means having the right to choose what suits your family's needs and sometimes a mother's sacrifice is worth it. That's the kind of balance Will wanted to debate in his lecture.'
She watched it out of curiosity before he sent uploaded it. She thought it was quite likely to put her husband in another jam but she did not expect it bring their life at Eton to an end. That said, from the moment she knew there'd been a complaint which made no sense to her, just like the one against his recommendation of The Long Ships to the boys of the Huxley Book Club, she had a sixth sense it was going to be serious.
Knowland was suspended shortly before Eton geography teacher Matthew Mowbray was put on trial accused of sexually abusing pupils in their beds at night. He was found guilty of eight charges of sexual activity with a child and sentenced to five years in prison earlier this week. 'The proportionality of the school's response towards a honest, moral teacher who uploaded a feisty lecture? It feels personal. Tell me what is is the real crime at Eton?'
The lecture cited the idea that men are hardwired to protect their families and provide for them. In standing up for the right to debate this, Knowland has been stripped - albeit for now - of his own ability to do either. 'The outcome of this drive for tolerance has been intolerance,' concludes Rachel, 'and how wrong is that?
Credentialed Frauds
The so-called "experts" telling us what to do have a less-than-stellar track record.
In the last couple of weeks, in the form of the controversy about whether or not presumptive First Lady Jill Biden should be addressed as “Dr.,” the utter fraudulence of credentialism has taken center stage. As Patriot Post editor Thomas Gallatin noted, the indignation arising from the notion that anyone would challenge Jill Biden’s status has precipitated rather ironic results, “exposing the absolute vacuous nature of her dissertation upon which she was granted her preferred title.”
Vacuous is too kind. Biden’s thesis is a puerile, sophomoric mess rife with math errors, typos, and breathlessly inane passages such as this: “According to the Retention Director at Cecil Community College, Cecil Community College has made a concerted effort to address retention.”
Fox News host Tucker Carlson minced no words when describing her efforts. “The whole thing is just incredibly embarrassing,” he stated. “And not just to poor, illiterate Jill Biden, but to the college that considered this crap scholarship.”
Yet far more important, Carlson also addressed the bigger picture. “It’s a class thing. We have a class system in this country. … A certain type of person gets degrees … not in order to learn or to create, or to achieve anything impressive … no. Instead, to justify their power over you. They’ve got more merit badges so they rule. … It’s why they shout at you and call you names when you mention it. … If you are allowed to point out that Jill Biden isn’t really a doctor … then you are just one step away from noticing that the medals on their chests aren’t real either.”
For quite some time, our nation has been besieged by a confederacy of dunces, presented as America’s “best and brightest,” even as these so-called “experts” have brought us to the brink of chaos. Codevilla’s above-quoted column was engendered not by the pandemic but by the economic calamity of 2008, when those very same merit-badge wearers brought the entire world to the brink of economic armageddon. And when the ensuing bailout was precipitated in response to their grotesque malfeasance, the realities of our class system were exposed in no uncertain terms. “Too big to fail” institutions on Wall Street and elsewhere received billions of dollars of taxpayer largesse, while Main Street Americans were saddled with catastrophic job losses and millions of home foreclosures, even as they were lectured about the inevitably of anemic economic growth, a.k.a. the “new normal,” going forward.
In short, ordinary Americans who lived in wholly irrelevant “flyover country” were “deplorable” long before Hillary Clinton coined the term during the 2016 presidential election.
And now it’s even worse. Above all else, the pandemic — the very same one precipitated by the ruling class’s fanatic and unquestioning devotion to globalism — has revealed the inner-Napoleon that attends some of the most contemptible “do as I say, not as I do” political hacks this nation has ever endured. While ordinary Americans are suffering unconstitutional, life-altering lockdowns and mask mandates, standing in line at food banks and coping with the wholesale destruction of their livelihoods, our self-anointed “betters” dine without masks in fancy restaurants, get their hair done in salons, and travel during their own imposed travel bans — all while getting the regular paychecks millions of Americans no longer receive.
Science? Science is whatever they say it is. Masks are unnecessary, then essential. Hydroxychloroquine is useless and dangerous until it’s efficacious. The timeline necessary to realize the replacement of fossil fuel usage by technologically viable alternatives can simply be arbitrarily decreed.
Justice? A genuine attempted coup d'état takes a back seat to a phony Russia-collusion investigation. Two former spymasters who lied to Congress get media gigs, while a political consultant who does the same thing gets a SWAT team dragging him out of his house at dawn with the media “coincidentally” in attendance. A faux impeachment is precipitated against a sitting president for purportedly improper political influence vis-à-vis Ukraine, while the videotaped braggadocio of the presumptive incoming president, promising to cut off a billion dollars in aid to the same nation unless a prosecutor investigating his son is fired, remains wholly “unexplored.”
And in a seamless transition engineered by Big Tech and its media allies, unexplored becomes nonexistent or “canceled.” Thus the op-ed questioning Jill Biden’s credentials earns author Joseph Epstein the removal of his profile from the website of a Northwestern University that laughingly states its commitment to the “academic freedom and freedom of expression” it just eliminated. A story disseminated by the oldest continually published newspaper in the nation illuminating the damning ties between Hunter Biden and Chinese Communists earns that paper a two-week Twitter ban. Any dissenting or alternative viewpoints regarding the current election, the Wuhan flu, or a host of other topics where such viewpoints are inimical to the interests of the ruling class are censored, while their promulgators are often doxxed, ridiculed, and/or fired.
In a recent column, leftist Glenn Greenwald highlights the phony fact-checkers who obfuscate the truth in service to the ruling-class agenda, warning that their ongoing efforts auger a “future in which unseen tech overlords police our discourse by unilaterally arbitrating truth and falsity, decree what are permissible and impermissible ideas, and rigidly impose the boundaries of acceptable debate.”
But it’s not the future. It’s right now. And it’s going to get much worse because these self-appointed arbiters of truth are — above all else — massively insecure. So massively insecure that they would rather censor people than debate them, even when they control the levers of power in academia, tech, Hollywood, the media, and corporate boardrooms.
Unfortunately, they are abetted by most people because the scourge of political correctness has made traveling the path of least resistance — and avoiding confrontation like the plague — an endemic part of the American ethos.
If we are to remain a free nation, such self-imposed reticence cannot stand. The years of incremental surrender by decent Americans to the bastardization of language, the indoctrination infesting our education system, and the increasing debasement of our liberties must no longer go unchallenged. We must all find the courage to make it clear a debate does not end simply because one of our “enlightened” thinkers calls us “bigots” or any other derogatory term used to deliberately stifle the free exchange of ideas. At this point, silence equals appeasement — or outright surrender.
Surrender to whom? A cadre of self-aggrandizing “experts” who are anything but.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/76607-credentialed-frauds-2020-12-21
UK: University 'safe spaces'? As I found, they're a danger to us allBy ANDREW DOYLE
Last winter, I was invited to give a talk on satire by the International Politics Society at Aberystwyth University.
I spoke mostly about my satirical online persona Titania McGrath, an identity-obsessed social justice activist who is always on the lookout for new ways to be offended.
By and large, the students were polite, receptive and eager to be challenged. However, the same could not be said for the academic staff, who had bizarrely refused to let the society publicise the event on the grounds that a talk that was likely to be ‘antagonistic to woke culture’ would violate their ‘departmental ethos of promoting diversity’.
Clearly their passion for ‘diversity’ didn’t extend to diversity of opinion. Worryingly, it seems they are not alone.
For as a disturbing study published yesterday by think tank Civitas has revealed, freedom of speech in Britain’s universities is in a perilous state.
In fact, of the 137 registered universities in the UK, 93 have experienced a controversy relating to censorship of free speech.
The situation is so parlous that the report even recommends that 35 per cent should face government intervention to resolve their issues, while a further 51 per cent should be offered direction on how best to improve.
Toxic
The figures make for grim reading. But are they that surprising? I don’t think so. For the depressing truth is that for a decade, a toxic new strain of identity politics has seized control of our major cultural and educational institutions.
The origins of this trend can be traced to academia, in particular the kind of post-modern ideas that have given rise to trendy disciplines such as Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Disability Studies and Fat Studies (yes, they all exist).
With so many academics now behaving like activists, it is inevitable that standards in higher education should suffer — leaving any conviction in the value of debate swept to one side.
And so it’s hardly surprising that in recent years, a new generation of academics has decided that emotional ‘safety’ ought to be prioritised over intellectual rigour, and they have managed to persuade a substantial proportion of the student body of the same.
As a result, many undergraduates believe they should not be expected to encounter distressing ideas on campus, either in their course content or in their personal lives.
But what’s particularly striking about the Civitas study is how it’s often the most prestigious universities, such as Cambridge and Oxford, which have imbibed this snake oil.
This became apparent this month, when Cambridge’s University Council attempted to amend the university’s free speech policy to insist staff and students must be ‘respectful’ of different opinions.
Thankfully, the governing body accepted an amendment proposed by Arif Ahmed, a reader in philosophy at Gonville and Caius college, to change the wording from ‘respectful’ to ‘tolerant’.
It may seem like a small change, but without his intervention, the very concepts of debate and dissent — the lifeblood of higher education — would have been seriously compromised.
Such victories, however, are far from the norm. In October a group of students — at Cambridge again — campaigned for a porter at Clare College to be fired because, in his role as a city councillor, he refused to support a motion that ‘transgender women are women’.
The students claimed that his opinions made them feel ‘unsafe’, one of the most common tactics of today’s ‘cancel culture’, a system of boycotting and public shaming that attacks anyone who expresses an unfashionable view.
This is why former Home Secretary Amber Rudd was disinvited from speaking at Oxford in March, apparently due to her involvement in the Windrush scandal. And why, in the same week, gender historian Selina Todd was ‘No Platformed’ at Exeter College for supposed ‘anti-trans’ views.
It’s also why feminists Julie Bindel and Linda Bellos have had invitations to speak rescinded by universities, because their belief in anatomical sex differences has been interpreted as ‘transphobic’.
But surely there is something perverse about an academic institution clamping down on those who wish to challenge the orthodoxies of the time?
It may sound harsh, but it’s the simple truth that few innovations, scientific or artistic, have come about without offending someone or other.
Conformity
When Galileo supported the Copernican theory of the earth’s motion around the sun, he wasn’t being ‘respectful’. He was causing offence to religious authorities, which is why he spent his final days under house arrest.
Meanwhile, the dire state of free speech on campuses is hardly helped by an atmosphere of conformity among academic staff. According to a 2017 study by the Adam Smith Institute, less than 12 per cent are Right-leaning, compared with roughly half the population.
The consequences of this were charted in a report by the Policy Exchange think tank, which found that one in three conservative scholars claims to self-censor ‘for fear of consequences to [their] career’.
It was proof that while university leaders claim to uphold free speech, academics who might once have refused to toe the line are now aware that doing so would jeopardise their career prospects.
Ultimately, the freedom of speech we enjoy today was secured at great cost by our ancestors, some of whom were willing to die for the principle.
It’s poignant that the Civitas report comes in the week 14 terrorists were found guilty of complicity in the Paris terror attacks of 2015, where gunmen stormed Charlie Hebdo and murdered 12 people after the magazine dared to satirise the Prophet Muhammad.
It also comes only two months after French schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded by an Islamist extremist for showing those same cartoons during a lesson on free speech.
Typically, certain sections of the Left-wing commentariat have suggested that, in part, the victims were to blame, the horrific implication being that by expressing themselves too freely, they had forfeited their freedom to exist.
Ridicule
But, if anything, both atrocities demonstrated that freedom of speech is something that constantly needs to be defended. It is the keystone of any liberal democracy.
Yes, there are those who claim that some may abuse their free speech to demean minority groups, but the best way to oppose such behaviour is through counter-argument, ridicule and peaceful protest.
Bad ideas are never defeated through censorship. It simply allows those who have been silenced to claim an undeserved status of martyrdom.
That is why it’s so important that we return to the values of the civil rights luminaries of the 1960s — such as Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks — all of whom understood that without freedom of speech, theirs was a lost cause.
This hard work must begin in our higher education institutions, because this is where the next generation of leaders will be cultivated. Universities should never be a ‘safe space’. The future wellbeing of our society depends on it.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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