Not just schools but even most universities these days are mindless drone production centres. When you study social sciences or history, at best, you are churned out as a mockingbird wired to only tread well trodden paths. Go out of bounds and delve into subjects such as mind control or dark occult practices and you are ostracised and outcast in mainstream circles of academia.

Ten times out of ten the pupils are trained to take aim and fire at the privileged
pet-peeves of postmodernism. These are: patriarchy, phallocracy, paternalism,
racism, sexism, machismo, racist industrial pollution (that is, only that
pollution that is putatively caused by the white elites and discharged on “minorities”), Europe, Eurocentrism, the white European male, the male in general, Columbus and the Catholics, religion, God, transcendence, metaphysics, the spirit, colonization and early imperialism, and sometimes, ever more infrequently, “capitalism,” preferably singled out as a vague synonym for economic oppression.

Never, though, are the students made to visit the polemic upon the concrete
working of the hierarchies of real power: say, to investigate the effective composition, functioning, and history of the political and financial establishments of the West.

The social sciences . . . suffer when fashionable nonsense and word games displace the critical and rigorous analysis of social realities. Postmodernism has three principal negative effects: a waste of time in the human sciences, a cultural confusion that favors obscurantism, and a weakening of the political left . . . No research [ . . . ] can progress on a basis that is both conceptually confused and radically detached from empirical evidence [ . . . ]. What is worse [ . . . ] is the adverse effect that abandoning clear thinking and clear writing has on teaching and culture.

Students learn to repeat and to embellish discourses that they only barely understand. They can even, if they are lucky, make an academic career out of it by becoming expert in the manipulation of an erudite jargon.

• Guido Preparata