{"id":51276,"date":"2015-02-13T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2015-02-13T18:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=51276"},"modified":"2015-02-13T06:39:27","modified_gmt":"2015-02-13T12:39:27","slug":"by-degrees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=51276","title":{"rendered":"By Degrees"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a college degree.<\/p>\n

And other than writing for some portion of my living for pretty much my entire adult life, I’ve never really “used it”. \u00a0My BA was in English, with minors in History and German (and two courses short of a minor in Computer Science, although it was the type of computer science that is pretty obsolete today). \u00a0Most of what I use for a living, I picked up on my own – and yes, college certainly helped me “learn how to learn”, which has been the stated justification for humanities degrees among the independently-non-wealthy for decades.<\/p>\n

So college was good for me; I’m glad I went. \u00a0But a degree doesn’t say all that much about a person.<\/p>\n

Least of all an “elite” degree. \u00a0The\u00a0best\u00a0<\/em>thing an Ivy League degree says about a person is that between the ages of 14 and 17, they knew enough to play the paper chase with enough excellence to punch all the tickets that “elite” school recruiters were looking for, because they had a sense of the importance of that most important byproduct of an “elite” education; access to the alumni directory. \u00a0And that’s the\u00a0best\u00a0<\/em>thing it says. \u00a0 The other things it says – legacy admission, overentitlement, educational stage parents – are less salutary.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, many of the greatest Americans – from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Gates – had no college education (at the least).<\/p>\n

So after eight years of stonewalling about Barack Obama’s college transcripts, the media is suddenly obsessed with Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s college career – which was cut short when he dropped out to start his career.<\/p>\n

Will that scupper Walker with the American people<\/a>? \u00a0Charles CW Cooke says there are a couple sides to that question:<\/p>\n

How effective the approach would be during a general election is anybody\u2019s guess, for at present Americans exhibit a strange and inconsistent attitude toward their dropouts. In theory, this is a nation that was built by the rebels and the nonconformists \u2014 more specifically, by the recalcitrant revolutionaries of Valley Forge, the chippy entrepreneurs of the frontier and of Silicon Valley, and by the ambitious Lincolnian auto-didacts who looked at their conditions and sought to improve them on their own terms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, many of the great advances in human history came from the self-taught autodidact.<\/p>\n

In practice, however, America is becoming increasingly rigid and Babbit-like. When a given individual makes it without school, we lavish him with praise and with adulation and we explain his rise with saccharine appeals to the American spirit; when our own children suggest that they might wish to dropout, however, we tut-tut and roll our eyes and make sneering jokes about Burger King.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are, of course, two Americas:<\/p>\n

This is no accident. Rather, it is the product of an increasing tendency among college-educated Americans to regard the letters after their names as a distinguishing mark that renders them as part of a special, exclusive class. By willfully conflating their established educational achievements and their presumed intellect or societal worth \u2014 in Dean\u2019s words, their \u201ceducation\u201d per se \u2014 these people extract every last ounce of social value from their investment, and make it appear as if the only way to compete with them is to join them…Sorry, Mr. Walker, you have the wrong colored dot on your forehead to run for higher office.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think a person whose life has been focusing on accomplishing things would make a nice switch from a President with all sorts of credential who has accomplished nothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a college degree. And other than writing for some portion of my living for pretty much my entire adult life, I’ve never really “used it”. \u00a0My BA was in English, with minors in History and German (and two courses short of a minor in Computer Science, although it was the type of computer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187,16,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-16","category-conservatism","category-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51276"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51284,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51276\/revisions\/51284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}