I guess my main reason is to get a chuckle. Though I'm a liberal, I think we need to work together and - gasp - compromise and have true bipartiasanship to get anyway. I know our culture and mass media is not into that and encourages complete disagreement and refusal to acknowledge each other's side.
Schlafly's "Eagle Forum" is a super conservative and conspiracy theory driven program. I imagine if Michael Moore ran a podcast, that would be the liberal version of "Eagle Forum."
I listened to a podcast on the dangers of 'sustainability' and 'going green.' It was quite hilarious. My mouth fell open several times at the wild theories thrown about by her so called 'experts.' I never knew that trying to conserve the environment was anti-Christian. I guess she never got the memo from the Catholic Church on their views of global warming (which according to Schlafly is a liberal conspiracy).
Inspired from her podcast, I decided to check out her website and sign up for her regular emails. I find the ones focusing on the liberal conspiracies in our public schools the most interesting. I guess - as a liberal - I am supposed to be advocating gay marriage, abortion, reliance on wellfare, anti-American attitudes (that we should go without so third world countries can supplant us), atheism, and any such wild idea. Somehow, though, I never got the memo from the liberal powers that be.
Here is a great example of the flawed thinking that passes itself as fact on her website --
Obama Continues Pushing Absurd College Agenda
Americans who weren't fooled by the slick advertising and deceptive posturing of his campaign realized that Barack Obama was going to be a dogmatic authoritarian in office. One thing you can count on with such people is that they won't abandon their pet ideas, no matter the evidence against them.
(This is such a delicious piece that I can't wait to use it in my class next year. Notice Leef's use of language and syntax. "Americans who weren't fooled" leaves the impression that either a) you are a fool for believing what the president said or b) you are simply not being a good "American" if you do believe him. Notice too his use of the phrase "with such people" which seems to further drive the wedge between "those people" (liberal heathens) and "us" (family oriented, conservative "Americans").
Just keep in mind what kind of "evidence" Mr. Leef really uses in here. And he should know better. If you read his credentials on-line, the man is far too well educated to spout such divisive foolishness.
Barack Obama's notion that the way to increase employment and output is through government "stimulus" spending is one such idea. There never was any reason to believe that, and only die-hard Keynesians persist in this wishful thinking.
Another such idea is that the United States is "falling behind" other nations with regard to college graduation rates, and it's necessary for us to regain "leadership." Obama first raised that idea back in February 2009, and on August 9 of this year, he said exactly the same thing in a speech at the University of Texas.
"In a single generation, we've fallen from first place to 12th place in college graduation rates for young adults," Obama said, a situation he declared to be "unacceptable." To deal with this supposed problem, he has set a national goal of "retaking the lead" by 2020-that is, having "a higher share of graduates than any other nation on Earth."
Congress has already given Obama the policies he wants to reach that goal, by increasing Pell Grants and making it easier for students to repay their federal loans. I have argued elsewhere that those changes will have bad consequences; here, I'll show that the core idea, that the country needs more college graduates, is nonsensical.
(First things first. I'm sure you can find commentary on every president going back to the beginning of public education worrying about whether or not America is falling behind. So the problem is not unique to our current president. But that is the least alarming of Leef's statements. I dare him to spout this one on any college campus or in front of any parents who are taking out second mortages or draining saving funds to put their children through college: increasing Pell Grants and making it easier for students to repay their federal loans . . . will have bad consequences.)
The first point to observe is that "our" college graduation rate is just a statistical artifact, like "our" home ownership rate and "our" voting rate. To people imbued with a central planning mindset, such statistics betoken national success or failure. In fact, the nation isn't doing anything. Millions of individuals are deciding whether or not to go to college and complete the course of study. Students and parents make those decisions with good (but not necessarily perfect) knowledge of the student's capabilities, the costs of college, and the prospective benefits of doing so.
(Remember what Leef said of using evidence in his first paragraph. You can read the previous paragraph a thousand times, and you tell me where there is a hint of evidence in that entire thing! It's all a matter of semantics. This is what people do - regardless of what political side they are on - when they are grasping at straws and trying to conjure an argument out of nothing. So they resort to analogy and semantics, "Well, that is like saying . . . ")
Therefore, when Obama pronounces America's college graduation rate "unacceptable," he's saying that many of us are making the wrong decision. In an unguarded moment, he might even say that some Americans are behaving "stupidly" (like the Cambridge police) in not choosing to get their college degrees and thereby preventing us from "retaking the lead." On the contrary, there are strong reasons to believe that college education has already been greatly oversold and many of those who have "invested" in it are going to regret their decision.
(Notice how Leef is now putting words in the president's mouth . . . "In an unguarded moment, he might even say . . ." Come on. For a professor to do such a thing, when we teach elementary school kids not to leap to conclusions or put words in other peoples' mouths, well, it's a shame.)
Obama and his education establishment allies note that on average, people who have college degrees earn a lot more than people who don't. True, but irrelevant. Individuals can't make decisions based on what the average person has experienced; they must make decisions based on what they expect will happen to them.
(How do you like Leef's use of evidence there! Wonderful. He concedes a fact, "on average, peoeple who have college degrees earn a lot more than people who don't. True, but irrelevant." So what extremestis like Leef - or Moore or Stewart or Limbaugh or Glenn or Coultier - do is either refute what they don't want to believe or simply disregard it. Hence we get the wonderful tactic of "true, but irrelevant." And just to muddy the waters some more, good luck trying to decipher the last sentence in that paragraph. Another wonderful tactic. Let's just try to move far away from the main argument by focusing on an obscure idea in the most complicated terms possible. What happened to Mr. Leef's "evidence"? Why can't a person make a decision based on averages?)
Some students — those who are well-prepared for college and intent on learning — will gain a lot of knowledge from their coursework, knowledge that might turn into a high-paying career. Unfortunately, a large number of young Americans are poorly prepared for college, disengaged from academic work, and mainly interested in college because it can be, as the title of a new book puts it, The Five Year Party.
(Interesting. This is clear cut and to the point. Though one must wonder how many students who earned degrees and now have high-paying jobs also partied while in college. I don't think one can draw such a hard line here. College is not so black and white.)
Even before the current recession, many of those kids wound up employed in low-skill, low-pay "high school" jobs such as cashiers, waiters, theater ushers, postal workers, and so on. Now that we're seemingly stuck in recession, stories about young people with college degrees and big debts, but mediocre to poor jobs, are commonplace.
(True. But irrelavant. Ha. Just kidding. I agree with this statement. But elaborate on it more. Are you telling me, Mr. Leef, that you'd rather send your son or daughter out into the current workforce without a degree than with a degree? And maybe it's the idealist in me, but the purpose of a college education is not solely to get a well paying job. It's to get educated. Here's a story I heard from the head of campus life at BSU when I was an RA there. His roommate was going to inherit his father's large dairy farm. He was going to do that the rest of his life. So why are you here? the head of campus life asked him. The roommate replied, "my father is making me. He wants me to be educated. He wants me to have what my father never did." Education for education's sake.)
It's important to stress that the phenomenon of college graduates working in jobs that call for only basic skills and trainability is nothing new. In their 1999 book entitled Who's Not Working and Why, economists Frederic Pryor and David Schaffer noted that since 1971, there has been an increasing trend of college graduates taking "high school" jobs. They blamed that on the low standards that prevail at many colleges and universities.
(Finally, some evidence. But a book from1999? Who was running the country then? Why didn't anything get done then to get us out of the supposed downward spiral we are currently in? Who was president after that? Why didn't they get us out of this fix? Or could it be that maybe there is only so much a president can really do - regardless of their party? Why raise this question when you just want to bash the president who is not affiliated with your party? And that is simply the goal of these types.)
If we already are graduating many young people from college who learn little and will wind up in jobs that most high school kids could do, why should we want more of them?
(Well, the one logical response to this would be that - hopefully - and maybe this is the idealist in me coming out - is that while in college, students garnered skills or ideas or passions that at some point down the road might make them an enviable applicant for a job. Think of Steve Jobs' own statement that a class on typography - and one that he just took because he always wanted to, though it had nothing to do with his major (in fact, Jobs would drop out of college) - made all the difference ten years later when he was creating the apple personal computer. We never know when the skills we learn with come in handy. But at least we have those skills. And make no doubt about it, if you don't go to college, you might not be getting certain skills that you can't find anywhere else.)
Many young Americans, especially those who are academically marginal students, correctly see college as a nearly worthless boondoggle costing a lot of scarce time and money. That explains why college enrollment rates are not going up. And if observers like Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds who say that higher education is our next "bubble" are right, the Obama administration's policy of getting more people through college looks a lot like the last-gasp efforts by Fannie Mae to lure more low-income people into mortgages.
(Now what was our president supposed to say? Really. Could you imagine the backlash - surely, from Mr. Leef himself, if he would have come out and said, "There is a higher education bubble that is about to burst. Young Americans should not strive to attend university. Instead, they should be lucky to earn anything above minimum wage. In fact, in these hard economic times, they should be content to simply have a job!" Come on! Survey parents in America on their hopes and dreams for the children. I have to believe that 'earning a college degree' will show up more than 'work at Wal-mart" will).
But shouldn't we worry about "falling behind" other countries? No. We can't magically transform our anemic economy into a powerhouse by scraping the bottom of the barrel to find more disengaged kids to process through our credential factories. The truth is that there is no direct connection between national prosperity and "educational attainment."
(True, But irrelevant. Ha. Got you again! I agree with this statement. But as a fellow conservative, Neil Postman, noted some time ago, the purpose of an 'education' is not economic prosperity. That might be part of it, but it is not the whole part. The purpose of an education is to become a productive citizen. Now, if I were a hard left nut-case I'd say something harsh like "and that is exactly why Mr. Leef and his cronies don't want Americans to go to college: they don't want free thinkers who will challenge what they say. They simply want blind followers who won't question and who will just believe whatever wild theory - global warming is a hoax, our president wants to turn America into a Muslim nation, what we really need to do is drill, baby, drill . . .")
That is the crucial point Professor Alison Wolf makes in her eye-opening book Does Education Matter?
She demonstrates that it's neither necessary nor sufficient for a growing, prosperous economy for a country to get the maximum number of its citizens through college. Dragooning more people into college won't give us a better workforce or better jobs. It will only give us more credential inflation as employers demand college degrees for mundane jobs.
Just like the notion that federal deficit spending will revive the economy, the idea that getting more young Americans through college will make the country more competitive and prosperous is utterly mistaken. Of course, Obama will never abandon it.
(Again, what president - democrat or republican - is going to get up in front of the nation and spout this? Zero.)
1 comment:
Oh man, how can you listen to this person? I would get a laugh out of the absurdity if I could stop thinking about how people LISTEN to this guy and BELIEVE his extremist views.
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