COLLEGE STUDENTS HAVE SHOWN DEEP DEFICITS OF KNOWLEDGE AND CRITICAL THINKING REGARDING CORONAVIRUS
College students, what has been wrong with you for the past 18 months?
Historically, students have protested about a wide range of issues: segregation, wars, environmental damage, university investment practices, et al. Basic conditions facilitated this activism: students were concentrated on campuses, they had spare time that wage workers and homemakers lacked, and they were inquisitive and idealistic. Protesting was also a good way to meet women.
Students often conducted large rallies and teach-ins, organized strikes and boycotts and broke into university presidents’ offices. Once in, these erstwhile “insurrectionists” sometimes stayed for days. While I was in college, students protested from the first week, about a faculty tenure decision, until graduation day, because the gowns weren’t made by union labor. The years between encompassed an overlapping series of causes. Throughout, students wore t-shirts or buttons exhorting others to “Question Authority.”
During the past 18 months, students have passively abdicated their traditional social consciousness-raising role. Students used to be radicals. Now they’re TikTok-stupefied reactionaries who have naively internalized and sponsored the corporate media and government lie that Covid imperiled all Americans, regardless of age or health status.
I work with college students. When I have asked them why students have tolerated Coronavirus closures, a few have confided that they knew closing schools was a poor idea. But they felt outnumbered; a wave of social media sentiment supported closures. It seemed futile to swim against the tide.
Disappointingly, most students with whom I have spoken supported closures. This cohort displayed an absence of knowledge regarding the very low risks that keeping colleges open would have entailed. Even if infected, 99.97% of students survive without treatment; with treatment, these rates improve. Survival odds are better than during typical flu seasons.
School closure supporters have also displayed deep critical thinking deficits. They have advocated extreme measures to limit slight risks to a clearly identifiable segment of the population, without considering such measures’ costs to the vast majority. Our schools have failed to educate students to command facts and place these facts in their larger context. Neither most students, nor their teachers, can discern between good options and bad ones.
Despite their “wokeness,” students and teachers have been in a deep Coronavirus sleep. Students have characteristically, gullibly bought the easy, superficial, false label; in particular, the myth that students are “super spreaders.” Infected students would typically have manifested mild or no symptoms. Consequently, they would have been unlikely to infect old people. How often does a college student even see an older person, much less share space with them?
Lockdown-supporting students also frequently cite the exception, and ignore the rule. They invoke a single example they heard from some unidentified news source regarding one--probably fundamentally unhealthy student--who died with--probably not from--Coronavirus somewhere. Public policy cannot sensibly be predicated on vague, rare, anecdotal exceptions.
The recent, extreme risk aversion of many college students and administrators is especially odd given college life’s widely accepted risks. Students often engage in, and college administrators routinely condone, substance abuse and sexual activity, reasoning that these often consequential behaviors are age-appropriate and even socially functional and psychologically necessary: kids being kids.
Students should have mingled from the beginning of the “pandemic.” The resultant development of natural immunity among students would have served as an additional societal brake on infection of those at higher risk. Natural immunity is 27 times more robust than is injected immunity. But pharmaceutical giants can’t profit from natural immunity.
Students could also have treated the 2020 elections as a referendum on the lockdowns, and voted against Democrats who orchestrated and supported these. But they didn’t.
Further, students, who were never at significant virus risk, have passively tolerated the mandated, experimental injection of a purported “vaccine.” Vaxx effectiveness appears to be short-lived. As data from intensive, early vaccinators Israel, the UK, Iceland and Scotland show, vaxx effects seem to “wear off” within five months. Consequently, Israel has begun another vaxx campaign, adding a third shot to the prior two shot protocol.
The risk of student vaxxes never justified any ostensible rewards. Nearly all students were fine without vaxxing. Yet, numerous healthy students have developed myocarditis after vaxxing; some have died. The bigger concern is that injections may cause long-term harm. Long term safety studies haven’t been conducted; there wasn’t time to do so during a reckless “warp speed” process. Some researchers have observed that the Covid mRNA injections move through the body more readily than do conventional vaccines. Some fraction of mRNA vaccines are said to land in the ovaries of young injectees. Some vaxx critics say that vaxxes are causing the virus to mutate, thus enhancing risk not only to injectees but also to the uninjected.
Aside from the vaxx’s adverse physical effects, vaxx mandates deprive students of medical freedom. Intrusions on medical freedom seem a far weightier issue than many that students have protested in the past five decades.
Student vaxx mandates were never about public health. They’re about coercion and party politics. This was obvious even before universities like Rutgers required on-line students to vaxx.
Ultimately, the vaxx crusade is an effort to sell the Big Lie that Democrat state and municipal governments’ various Coronavirus interventions saved humanity. Such a belief will help these governments to avert blame for the persistent harms caused by the lockdowns, and to justify broader and stricter future restrictions. Most students have been indoctrinated to accept a very wide range of governmental control, so they’ll meekly accept such revisionism.
Presumably, in-person college is much more valuable than are on-line classes. If on-line education equals the overall quality of an in-person classroom and social experience, universities should shift fully to the virtual model. They would save considerable money by divesting buildings and laying off most faculty and administrators. College costs could drop sharply and students could avert decades of debt. Plus, some latter day students are introverts; they’d rather sit in front of a screen than interact with peers.
But for the majority, the in-person college experience allows students to do things and meet people that they can’t do, or meet, during any other stage of life. Students just gave up a year and a third of that rare experience, without scientific basis.
The past 18 months are gone forever. Students’ ignorance, passivity and poor risk assessment have cost them many irreplaceable experiences, memories and relationships. Student passivity has also enabled the society-wide panic narrative and overreaction that has landed very directly on many non-students, including those in other nations: the isolation, the unemployment, the depression, the overdoses, the suicides, the lost dreams, the poverty, the hunger, et al.
Really bad work, students. Epic fail.
Excellent commentary. I do agree that the vast majority of students have now adopted the government propaganda lie. But we have to realize that this is the primary cohort of the indoctrination generation. This is really the first of a number of age groups that have truly been indoctrinated into post-modernism and victim culture that's driven by ideological groups rather than thinking groups. We reap what we sow and this college and high school generation is a very sad representation of that.
I do, however, know some college students that have fought back - and even won along with their parents. These students have been vaxx mandated but all had the virus previously and test very high for t-cells. Their parents threatened the college with an attorney and the college backed down and exempted them. That said - these students won’t protest or go out of their way to let others know that they can and should fight back. They may at some point and they are adamantly anti- this vaxx. So it’s a weak win, but something to build on if these groups get guts and a bit of support.
When was it that the small college conservative groups suddenly became the punk rock cool kids? They are the only groups saying “fight the man” (or, in the language of the Left “fight the non-gender-specific figure working in a management role in our fine institution of higher learning”). It’s those folks - listening to the likes of Shapiro, Peterson, Weinstein and others that are driving the push against these mandates and other freedom and liberty issues on campus. But they are small and the entirety of the administration, the student body and the media are against them and routinely call them racists, haters, etc. They get doxxed and they get punished.
I think there are more that may want to rise up - but they know that rising up could hurt them in their careers later - social media posts and videos live forever and we see what happens to people that dare to try to buck the system.
I used to teach physics as an adjunct at a local campus of the University of Maryland, from 2002 till 2019. After about 2017 I noticed a deterioration in the overall intellect of our students. We still had standouts but most were phone addicted and couldn't solve problems on their own. They cheated rather than think on their own. For a physics major that's a fatal defect. Grade inflation kept that small program from addressing this intelligently. It gave the students a giant sense of entitled power while at the same time they were helpless on their own. I blame a lot of things for this bovine passivity: phones; hovering parents of small families (I was one of seven. My parents couldn't hover. I was on my own at 18); dumbing down of curricula, but primarily feminization of schools, boys and men. Colleges in the US are now 59% female, 41% male. Yes, I'm female, but was a rule breaker by nature. I think the feminine hierarchy (my local state campus is top heavy with female administration and even professors) and the heavily female student body will follow the rules being pushed like a river of sewage from the government agencies that dominate University life. The college men I know just shrug and go for their degree hoping to get out and work in their field with a minimum of shaming for being men. It's a configuration perfect for inflicting a dangerous, useless vaccine on young people at government expense.