A lot of older folks have no footprint on Twitter and Facebook. They may even still read broadsheet newspapers that are dying on the vine due to the increasingly prohibitive expense of production costs coupled with dwindling subscriptions. Old habits die hard and this may be the only thing keeping actual print publications afloat in a world where younger generations have attention spans measured in nanoseconds.
This is not to say that seniors today are being left behind and jettisoned by the grinding approach of electronic and synchronous orbiting technology. There is a harsh reality afoot in this world today and that is that the average high school graduate of 60 years ago probably has higher intelligence and better reading and writing skills than many people today running around with graduate degrees.
Here is wisdom: There is only one thing in this world worse than no education and that is bad education. The kids today are no different than we were, but they are victimized by these tin horn liberal arts colleges that instead of preparing them for useful citizenship, indebts them with worthless skills. Education is not what it once was. It abuses its victims with a bill of goods, imbues them with a cultish self-hatred and sends them out into the world to destroy the foundations of civilized society.
Ask yourself if you were young and realized you would never attain the lifestyle of your parents and grandparents due to globalization enriching political leadership by swindling you of a dignified living. Ask yourself if you would be out there burning down someone’s business or tearing down statues at the bidding of educators deflecting responsibility away from themselves as charlatans while colleges get richer.
It is unfortunate that millions of people in America have been taken in by the scam of a college education and a subterfuge is at hand in the form of debt forgiveness on the backs of taxpayers. Ask yourself if you think the government is going to step forward and pay for your mortgage, car lease or gambling debts. You know the answer to that.
We will always need higher education for doctors, engineers, and specialists we depend on. Lawyers, not so much. We need to close most of America’s colleges and hand them the bill for ripping off the kids. We could start right here in the home city.
Excellent post, Ray. In this regard I consider myself fortunate while terrified for my younger relatives. Myself I used a combination of the Army College Fund and G.I. Bill to attend a decent school off post in the mid-90's, where I majored in civil engineering. That university was at the time a highly conservative central Texas school where mere mention of Hegelian Dialectic would have cost the utterer his or her tongue. I never used that degree in its intended professional capacity, although it both aided me with rapid promotion through the Army ranks and opened a number of career doors for me along the way.
Years later I went back to school—also on Uncle Sam's dime—and took an undergraduate degree in clinical psychology, at a much more liberal school. Recently I completed a graduate degree in political psychology at an extremely liberal university in Baltimore; I not only felt like a dinosaur but was often referred to as one by the cool kids who attended classes with me. Happily I am free of college debt but only due to the fact that I spent most of my adult life to date in the US Army.
Which brings me to my eighteen year-old niece who began a nursing program at Penn State a few months back. While I had encouraged her to go Coast Guard at least as means to pay for her education, she wouldn't hear of it, and so now she is already strapped with tens of thousands in student loan debt—some of which my wife and I will be paying off for her, although she doesn't really deserve it. But, we love her—so what else can we do?
The level of psycho-circus madness my niece is dealing with on a daily basis at university must be staggering. Fellow students quarantined in their dorm rooms, remote electronic classes even though she lives on campus. Critical Race Theory, postmodernism primers, racial segregation (she's half Egyptian), historical revisionism—I can't imagine dealing with what she faces. The true plot of her horror story is the debt to knowledge ration she will carry on her shoulders for the rest of her days.
While guys were in college and/or having a good time, I ran a department testing the stuff in your computers, and bought my first home when rates ran 13%. Cry me a river, I was earning $6.50 an hour plus 10-15 hours OT, my electric bill was $60, same as it is now.
