Zygmunt Bauman was one of the first philosophers who started talking about the erosion of the nation-state and the growing fluidity of existence back in 1999. The following quote from his foundational volume Liquid Modernity explains things such as the mattress-carrying battle against terrifying articles at Northwestern U that I blogged about earlier today:
The body has become the last shelter and sanctuary of continuity and duration. . . It is becoming safety’s last line of trenches which are exposed to constant enemy bombardment, or the last oasis among wind-swept moving sands. Hence the rabid, obsessive, feverish and overwrought concern with the defense of the body.
The higher education is being eroded. Nobody knows how to hang on to everything that made higher education worthwhile or even verbalize what is happening. The anxiety produced by these feelings of helplessness intensifies the need to protect what is perceived as the only territory that one still kind of controls, namely, the body.
The boundary between the body and the world outside is among the most vigilantly policed of contemporary frontiers.
No other boundary is safe from erosion, which is why the need to protect this very last frontier from fading becomes so urgent and fraught.
Clarissa's Blog 
The need to defend the body connects to a point raised weeks ago about the emerging age of robots. Mass education doesn’t matter if the mass is headed into some form of slavery.
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“The need to defend the body connects to a point raised weeks ago about the emerging age of robots.”
“Mass education doesn’t matter if the mass is headed into some form of slavery.”
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Personal development stunted by obssessive compulsive helicopter parents plays a role too.
If a person never had to deal with the idea that sometimes your parents can’t protect you by the time you go to college then that encourages infantile behavior in the face of stress so that mommy can save them.
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It seems like the students are being actively encouraged in all this by older people. The mattress-carrying person has appeared on the national news a lot more than the 31,5% cut in the public education budget of our state, for instance. And which of the two events will have a larger impact on the well-being of students?
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Well suffocating helicopter parents are gonna suffocating helicopter…
For one of that breed any young person who does not regress to infancy in the face of stress is a threat (maybe their own little snowflake might get bad ideas) so all young people are encouraged to behave as immaturely as possible.
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“The mattress-carrying person has appeared on the national news a lot more than the 31,5% cut in the public education budget of our state, for instance.”
I have a friend who’s a professor at a UC. He told me that the UC leadership –including Janet Napolitano, the President — is very excited about the prospect of MOOCs replacing ‘traditional’ teaching.
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Jesus. Where do these freaks even cone from?
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Inloco parentis ad absurdium. Isn’t it funny how that when college is available to more people and it’s become less optional that students have less freedom to “make mistakes” now than they did in the past?
I want to blame the Boomers and early Xers who got rid of in loco parentis and replaced it with helicopter parenting. Did it ever go away? Sure undergraduates don’t have a curfew anymore but they do have a mile long list of conduct rules and unofficial rules to follow. Of course the more likely it is that your parents and grandparents went to college in this country, the more likely it is that you get “second chances” because they are unevenly enforced. [I’m talking very much in general.]
I wonder if there’s some psycho sexual element to this freaking out. Traditional age students are increasingly not white and they are young and have the seemingly endless promise of another day, while educated early Xers and Boomers are staring down the limitations of their mortality and their own life choices. They have to compete with the young but also people they never figured on competing with in any serious manner so they rattle on about “paying dues” and systematically destroy education and opportunities.
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Today seems to be the day of massive brilliance on the blog. This is definitely something to think about. I’ve also been wondering what the psychological causes of so much hysteria about college are.
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