re: "Total Failure"

Froggy at Blackfive ("the paratrooper of love") sees the dead hand of America's education establishment behind the Occupy movement.

Money quote(s):

"If there is any coherent message that can be gleaned from the Occupy Wall Street “movement”, it is that our system of public and higher education can now be declared a total and complete failure. The fact that there exists no accountability at any level of our Education-Industrial Complex is perfectly clear for all to see."

For those under crushing student loan debt, why is it that you're mad at the people who loaned you the money in the first place, rather than the universities that consumed it (even as the easily available loan money encouraged schools to steadily, and greatly in advance of inflation, increase tuition costs)?

"(A) child that makes it through that system without dropping out shows up on a college campus totally unprepared for collegiate level academics finds him/herself in a psych, sociology, history, or literature class where their glaring deficiencies aren’t as much of a hindrance as they would be in Chemistry, Calculus, or Physics. Waiting for them there is a tenured hack with the full panoply of liberal/socialist agenda items infused into their course who sees his mission as one of evangelism rather than education. The classes are easy and even inspiring as the ponytailed professor shovels decades old, discredited, leftist socio-racial-economic dogma onto the student’s plates and rewards them for vomiting it back to him with no thought or concern whether those ideas have any practical application whatsoever."

CAA managed (through no particular virtue of his own) to dodge this particular minefield. Can anyone comment as to how accurate the depiction is?

"At the end of the day these young people have been destroyed, perhaps permanently, by adults whose only priority was a government paycheck and the privilege of suspending reality by living in the ivory tower. They are pitiable creatures indeed, and the fact that they are out in public proclaiming their abject ignorance through the humiliating use of the “human microphone” ought to be to the eternal shame of those who have allowed and facilitated this disastrous system of failure inculcation we call education."

10/12

re: "Occupy What?"

Victor Davis Hanson at Private Papers puts the Occupy movement into broader context.

Money quote(s):

"No wise politician should invest in the bunch like those rampaging in Oakland [2]. Their nocturnal frolics are a long way from Woody Guthrie’s Deportee, the Hobos’ “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” and the world John Steinbeck fictionalized. It is the angst of the wannabe class, overeducated and underemployed, which chooses to live not in Akron or Fowler, but in tony places like the Bay Area or New York, where annual rents are far more than a down payment on a starter house in the Midwest. Being educated, but broke and in proximity to the wealthy of like upbringing and background, are ingredients for riot." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

That last is as true in America as it is in Cairo, Beijing, Rome, or Paris.

"I don’t think the protests are really much over the Goldman Sachs bailout, or jerks like revolving-door Budget Director Peter Orszag starting back up at Citigroup, or Solyndra crony capitalism. Apparently, most middle-class and upper-middle class liberals — many of them (at least from videos) young and white [3] — are angry at the “system.” And so they are occupying (at least until it gets really cold and wet) financial districts, downtowns, and other areas of commerce across the well-reported urban landscape. As yet there is no definable grievance other than anger that others are doing too well, and the protestors themselves are not doing at all well, and the one has something to do with the other. I am not suggesting union members and the unemployed poor are not present, only that the tip of the spear seems to be furious young middle class kids of college age and bearing, who mope around stunned, as in “what went wrong?” " (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

CAA is given to understand that some, perhaps most, college students are burdened with large amounts of student loan debt.

CAA finds this puzzling, mostly because CAA financed his college tuition through a combination of money earned through work, scholarships, savings (including some thousands saved by my parents in my name), employer tuition assistance, and veteran's benefits. Some tuition payments were made via credit card, which I suppose could be considered a sort of college loan, but only in the most general sense.

So CAA's understanding of the "education bubble" is perhaps somewhat superficial, even unsympathetic.

"Students rarely graduate in four years, but scrape together parental support and, in the bargain, often bed, laundry, and breakfast, federal and state loans and grants, and part-time minimum wage jobs to “go to college.” By traditional rubrics — living at home, having the car insurance paid by dad and mom, meals cooked by someone else — many are still youths. But by our new standards — sexually active, familiar with drugs or alcohol, widely traveled and experienced — many are said to be adults.

Debt mounts. Jobs are few. For the vast majority who are not business majors, engineers, or vocational technicians, there are few jobs or opportunities other than more debt in grad or law school."

Taking on even more debt (on top of an unmarketable degree) in order to put off entry into the wage-earning workforce even later strikes CAA as something akin to taking a payday loan to the race track or to Las Vegas.

"Students with such high opinions of themselves are angry that others less aware — young bond traders, computer geeks, even skilled truck drivers — make far more money. Does a music degree from Brown, a sociology BA in progress from San Francisco State, two years of anthropology at UC Riverside count for anything? They are angry at themselves and furious at their own like class that they think betrayed them. After all, if a man knows about the construction of gender or a young woman has read Rigoberta Menchu [4], or both have formed opinions about Hiroshima, the so-called Native American genocide, and gay history, why is that not rewarded in a way that derivatives or root canal work surely are?

Class — family pedigree, accent, clothes, schooling — now mean nothing. You can meet your Dartmouth roommate working in Wall Street at Starbucks, and seem for all appearances his identical twin. But when you walk out the door with your environmental studies degree, you reenter the world of debt and joblessness, he back into the world of good money."

There's an unending debate, a constant tension, between education as job training and education as intellectual development. It's unending and constant, in part, because they're not completely mutually exclusive, unless taken to an extreme or in a tight economy.

"Never have Americans’ prospects seemed brighter — vast new energy reserves, an unmatched military, disarray in Russia, the Middle East and Europe — and never have Americans been more conditioned and readied for decline."

Optimism and positive thinking is a force multiplier. This should be one of the chief lessons of the Reagan Revolution.

11/6