One the current tropes among the populist right is that “college is useless, and you should send your kids to learn a trade”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There’s a truck loaded with cinder blocks full of truth in there – for many 18 year olds, a year or two spent learning how to weld, be an electrician or mechanic or tool and die maker would be a much faster path to self-reliance than four years at college racking up debts while learning little or nothing that one needs to succeed in the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, let’s be clear, here – I don’t think college needs to be a longer more expensive trade school; there can be <\/em>value to learning a “liberal art”, something traditionally intended to teach one to think<\/em> rather than strictly to design, build or fix something…<\/p>\n\n\n\n …provided <\/em>that that that education actually teaches how to think. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We’ll come back to that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As I’ve noted elsewhere, my father was a great <\/em>teacher. He taught. high school speech, writing and literature, and college-level education classes. He was one of the two<\/a> best teachers I ever had. He also used to agree, at least hypothetically, with the likes of Mike Rowe – the ideal education, he said, was spending a few months or years learning a trade, and then <\/em>going on to some other course of more abstract study after one could pay the bills. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This, of course, may have been a little idealistic projection from a man who, on good day, knew which end of a screwdriver to hit the nail with. He was and remains a brilliant teacher – and one of the least handy people I’ve ever met, myself included. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When I was in high school. and college, I had not the slightest interest in going to trade school – not out of any sense of college being “above it all” or “better” – I was every bit as peripatetic back then as I am today, and if could have squeezed in learning how to machine metal or be an electrician, I would have. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But to my Dad’s point, I also figured I already had a trade; I’d started in radio when I was 15<\/a>, and had learned a lot. I figured my fallback would be working at some station, somewhere. It wasn’t the dumbest idea, at a time when radio was a tough but viable way to make a living. It’s not advice I’d give a kid today, but that was then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the “trade” part figured out? I sought a life living in my head; I majored in English and minored in History and German. I also majored in Computer Science almost long enough to get the minor, but I hated it, and didn’t touch a computer for seven years after I graduated – but that’s another story. And for me, at least, the promise of a “liberal arts” education was fulfilled; I learned how to think, and when the opportunity to jam a bunch of different facets from my background together into a new career fell into my path, I was able to jump on it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, I’m not sure colleges today teach critical thinking <\/em>the way Dr. Blake did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But I come here not to wallow in nostalgia, but to weaponize it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While I don’t disagree in the least with my Dad, or Mike Rowe, I also think this is a lousy time for conservatives who are so inclined to completely abandon the academy, if only because it’s people from Harvard and Penn and MIT who will write the histories and the textbooks and play an inordinate role in defining our culture…<\/p>\n\n\n\n …and if you see the people who are driving our system toward collapse and calamity<\/a> today, that should be pretty terrifying. Because just as Califonria-style government followed Californians who fled to Colorado, a society run by the products of our crypto-Maoist university system – the judges, politicians and culture-definers of tomorrow – will follow you into your shop van or plumbing business. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Big Left has been ‘marching through the institutions” for over fifty years; they’re not going to be set back to square one by a season of scrutiny<\/a>. But it’s an opportunity. And the future of a free society demands that some young conservatives, and the older ones that still control some levers of power (if only their checkbooks<\/a>) take a shot at that tackle, before the current wave of barbarism completely rewrites the definition of “freedom” for a few more generations. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One the current tropes among the populist right is that “college is useless, and you should send your kids to learn a trade”. There’s a truck loaded with cinder blocks full of truth in there – for many 18 year olds, a year or two spent learning how to weld, be an electrician or mechanic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[324,321,24,10,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-education","category-big-left","category-culture-war","category-education","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86636","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=86636"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86637,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86636\/revisions\/86637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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