Because small children can’t write, college students are starting to demand the option to simply chat about their ideas instead of submitting term papers. Composition scholar Peter Elbow told an Atlanta conference of college writing teachers in 2011 that the grammar we learn by age 4 is “good enough,” and disbelieving attendee Mary Grabar added that colleges are “not really interested in teaching students to write and communicate clearly,” so communication is now “redefined as ‘performance’ involving the body, images, song, hip-hop, visual rhetorics, clothes, ‘everything but the written word as traditionally understood.’ ”

It’s gotten to the point where outsiders literally have to tell collegians, “Use your words.”

That sentiment was delivered by President Obama, who told graduating seniors at Rutgers this month, “Use your logic and reason and words” to rebut ideas they found disagreeable. But Obama is part of the progressive project to infantilize young Americans. The more Americans are dependent on the federal government, the more power accrues to the liberal cultural project. One day Daddy DC is giving an allowance to your school, the next he’s arguing that your locker rooms must be co-ed.