This is an important insight. I think it misses some history, but it’s basically valid.
Thesis: College is our only initiation rite. We lost the earlier religious rites of manhood, and college was offered to replace it. Now that college is fading, we need to return to churches.
This replacement is very recent. College has always been part of the initiation for aristocrats. It was irrelevant to bourgeois and peasants until 1946 when Deepstate broadened the cultural requirement in order to factor out the less controllable initiators. Deepstate was taking full control of colleges at the same time through grants and tenure and accreditation boards, so colleges became both initiator and Deepstate indoctrinator.
This author thinks we have to return to churches as the main source of baptism and confirmation. He misses the alternate secular initiators that were present in the era between churches and colleges. Before 1946, unions and Mutual Beneficial Societies and Fordist corporations were the initiators for peasants.
Clubs like Rotary and Masons were the initiators for bourgeois. (Masons were an MBS, so the classes weren’t entirely separate.)
After WW2, our defeated enemies Germany and Japan picked up the Fordist initiator as we abandoned it. The corporation fills both the baptism and the community service formerly supplied by religious groups.
Polistra's Mill 