Oh, So That's What "Liberal Education" Means

I was going to try to stay off this blog this week and instead get to bed at a reasonable hour, but Rick Santorum just said too many irresistably crazy things over the weekend. There was the thing about wanting to throw up about Kennedy distinguishing between church and state, or the claim that elderly Dutch people are afraid to go to the hospital because the nice doctors will have them put down. But as the father of a high school senior who is presently in the middle of the stressful college selection process, one item in particular caught my attention. It was the one about him addressing some tea party group in Michigan and calling Obama a snob because "he once said he wants everybody to go to college".

The context of his remarks was that he was expressing the idea that not everybody is meant for college—there are many people for whom that's not the right path to a career. That's actually something I can agree with. I have known many people who never went to college and ended up in a trade or a job from which they earned a comfortable living and had a satisfactory life. I've known people who went to college for four years and found it hard to find any kind of job in their field once they graduated. I've also known people who never went to college or got any kind of real vocational training and ended up living a hand-to-mouth existence at minimum wage or a little more, bouncing from one more or less menial job to the next. I'll grant you that college is not the right thing for everybody. To be fair, Obama has also apparently never specifically said that every American should have a four-year college degree. This White House policy statement on education just says that "President Obama is committed to ensuring that America will regain its lost ground and have the highest proportion of students graduating from college in the world by 2020. The President believes that regardless of educational path after high school, all Americans should be prepared to enroll in at least one year of higher education or job training to better prepare our workforce for a 21st century economy."

I think the statistics show that the days when you could go from high school to a good factory job that would pay you enough to live a reasonably comfortable life with a home of your own and a decent pension waiting for you after retirement are long gone. You may not need a four-year college degree, but you need some kind of post-secondary training or education if you're going to have a chance in today's economy. You know those modern manufacturing jobs that the president talked about in the State of the Union address a few weeks ago? He wasn't talking about a job pressing the button that makes the machine stamp out another hubcap. The people who are hiring for the kind of precision manufacturing jobs that pay good wages nowadays aren't going to turn just any bozo loose on equipment that, if not run by an operator with some moderately high-tech skills, is going to spew out a bunch of very expensive garbage. And where are those kinds of skills going to come from? Rick, what's your solution to that?

What mostly caught my attention, though, was this: "There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his." That's great, Rick. I'm glad to hear that you are working hard to save my children from that horrible disease, that painful affliction, that eternal curse that is a college education. Let's make sure that they never grow up to become engineers or doctors or teachers. Or lawyers, like you, a guy who has a BA, an MBA and a JD. I can see what that kind of indoctrination leads to.

Santorum hasn't left it at that, though. He went on ABC's "This Week" show to further explain his position and told George Stephanopoulos this: "You talk to most kids who go to college who are conservatives, and you are singled out, you are ridiculed, you are… I can tell you personally… I went through a process where I was docked for my conservative views. This is sort of a regular routine. You know the statistic … that 62 percent of kids who enter college with some sort of faith commitment leave without it. This is not a neutral setting." Is that what's behind this? He went to a place where applying the scientific method is a core value and people gave him a hard time about believing in things for which there is no empirical evidence? Rick was intellectually bullied by a bunch of mean liberals when he went to college, and he's still mad about it. Good of him to warn me about the terrible fate that awaits my impressionable children. So I guess I'll take his advice and let the Indians and the Germans and the Chinese and the Russians get those college educations, and I'll just send my kids to church instead.

Congratulations, graduates! You're all
godless communists now.