Less preaching, more education

Like 19th Century Methodists, today's liberal academics love to preach.

Switch on the discovery channel or pick up a history book, and you're likely to hit a barrage of left-liberals messages about saving the environment or the evils of European imperialism.

However, it wasn't always this way, as Fred Reed points out in a recent column "A Craving for Tyranny," traditional western education used to follow a quaint, old-fashioned idea called objectivity:

"I went to a small, very Republican, Southern college these many years ago. In those days communism was thought poorly of. Yet in my survey course on philosophy, we learned what Marx thought, not what to think about Marx. The readings represented his ideas fairly. For further knowledge, go to the library. We were expected to come to our own conclusions, and did. A different world."

When I was at secondary school I used to get annoyed by religious sermons and prayers at assembly time. However, in many ways I think today's situation is much worse. Now the preaching goes on 24-7.