Any college graduate can attest to
the idea that writing research papers is an exercise in regurgitating opinions.
When given an assignment, it is expected that the student will provide
citations and reference materials that already support the idea behind the
assignment. In other words, students are simply repeating what already has been
said by someone else doing the research. College libraries are often stacked
with scientific journals that professors recommend to students in order to find
verifiable information that is worthy of citing in a research paper. Many students probably feel that what they
are reading seems to be biased opinion at best, but mostly a bunch of big fancy
words arranged in way to make it appear as a structured sentence. That’s because that is exactly what it is.
From Fox News-
Some 120 papers published in established scientific journals over
the last few years have been found to be frauds, created by nothing more than
an automated word generator that puts random, fancy-sounding words together in
plausible sentence structures. As a result they have been pulled from the
journals that originally published them. http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/03/01/over-100-published-science-journal-articles-just-gibberish/
While this Fox News article references
only those fraudulent journals found
in the fields of computer science and math, it is extremely likely, if not an
absolute certainty that it is occurring in the social sciences as well. This
author was personally taught in social work education that students were not
expected to be able to give a thoughtful analysis on any subject, and quotes
from prominent researchers were likely to strengthen their papers. This is problematic in the sense that the vast
majority of these journals revolved around the idea of proving American culture
to be racist, sexist and economically unfair.
In fact, one professor went so far as to say, in a class focused on
social research, that it wasn’t unethical to lie about results that didn’t support
assumptions about racism. The reason given was that the populations being
studied (you and I) don’t know enough about racism to be able to realize the
extent racial attitudes are affecting society.
Another told this particular scribe that citing the Heritage Foundation
on a paper was unacceptable because The Heritage Foundation is biased.
Is it any wonder we have a society
that seems, for all practical purposes, to be unable to exercise logic? Our
education system has become nothing more than a protector of liberal opinion. By
limiting the intellectual input students can add to their own research, our
Universities are ensuring that they are regurgitating opinions and research
that support the worldview of the college. Whether that world view would be
liberal or conservative, it is wrong.
While there is a certain amount of
academic value in citing opinion and results that have already been validated,
denying a student the right to exercise their own logic and form an educated
opinion does little but trap them into one way of thinking. This has been
described by this author as being “trapped in the leftist box” in past
articles. Liberals are supposed to open minded and claim to intellectually
superior, but they fail to see when their policies don’t work. As a result of this
opinionated education system, we have new policy makers that are trapped into
this leftist way of thinking, believing that only solutions that have been
discussed by liberal, and often times socialist researchers are all that is
available to them. This keeps society spinning round and round trying to fit a square
peg into a round hole. All because the real bias in education lies in the fact
that conservative, patriotic opinions are silenced and humiliated in the class
room.
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