The book reviewed, The Preparation, sounds ideal for young men approaching manhood. From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:
International Man: Doug, you co-wrote The Preparation with Matt Smith and Maxim Smith.
What motivated the three of you to come together on this project, and why did you feel now was the right time to publish it?
Doug Casey: I’ve wanted to write a book like this for well over a decade. I talked Matt into co-authoring it because, frankly, I’ve become rather lazy, and writing is hard work. Matt only became interested in it, though, when Maxim, his son, turned 17. Matt didn’t want to encourage his son to wander off to a college—because colleges have turned into intellectual and social cesspools. Matt became quite interested in it, and more importantly so did Maxim, because Maxim has actually been a guinea pig for the ideas and solutions we propose in the book. For the last two years, Maxim has been putting the theory in the book into practice, and all of us are absolutely thrilled with the results from every angle.
Now is the right time for a book like this, because the nature of college has changed radically. It was once an institution that gave young men a chance to perfect their critical thinking skills and expand their knowledge of the world. Now it’s just an expensive extension of adolescence—a halfway house to lounge around, take a few classes, and party, while being indoctrinated with insane ideas from thoroughly corrupt professors. The nature of college has degraded over the last hundred years, and its downhill descent has accelerated in recent years.
I used to say—after I graduated in 1968—that I considered college a misallocation of four years of time and a bunch of money. Even though in those days it was still reasonably worthwhile, fairly exclusive, and relatively cheap. Now, paradoxically, it has little value, most everyone goes, but it’s brutally expensive. As time went on, I increasingly saw it as a waste of time. Now I see college as destructive, an active detriment.
Preparing them for a world that doesn’t exist is what an elder who used to work in EDU called it, good genes I call it.
Letting the Long March comrades take over EDU was a huge mistake.