Maggie's Farm

Not impressed by Kling.

I think the Chinese mandarin system was a great way to find and develop talent. Search out the most talented, train them, and give them every opportunity. No matter where you started out. Ditto the Church in medieval times. Even the Evil Empire got one thing right: they sought out the best dancers, athletes, etc. all over the country and trained them, regardless of their parents' ability to pay. Remember the Kirov and the Bolshoi balllets in the wicked old days of communism? Of course their dancers wanted to defect to make more money and have more artistic freedom, but they would never have got the free training over here that made them what they were...

I don't care if you're purple or green, if you're smart you should be educated. The problem with American universities now is that the best ones have become hopelessly corrupt, mills for processing the affirmative action quotas and the less-than-stellar rich brats who buy their way in, bully pulpits for PC professors... The bad ones waste the time and money of people who should be learning a trade, or something non-academic.

The excellent point that Kling made, however, is that one cannot train the stupid kids in technologies or trades that will become obsolete rapidly. As greedy companies rapidly outsource every last job they can (what in God's name we will do when we are finally at war with China and they have stolen every last one of our technological and manufacturing secrets from making everything we use, who knows?!) one wonders if there will be any jobs left for the working class besides chambermaids and gardeners and nannies and fast food help...

If one tries to remain optimistic that any decent jobs will be left in this country for our average citizens, the dumber kids will have to be trained to maneuver and sell themselves to employers without loyalty to their workforce. So they will need to learn not just how to be a good plumber (which requires entrepreneurial skills that only some are born with) but rather in etiquette, social skills, customer service, problem solving, working constructively as part of a team, a work ethic, etc. All the kinds of things that families, churches, and military service used to instill. Things more and more lacking in people raised in alternative families by people holding alien values.

The best thing about the post-war European educational system (now being dismantled) was its providing a free and excellent higher education for the most gifted members of society, no matter how poor their parents. Free universities that are ferociously difficult to get into--those are what we should have here. When I studied in Europe in high school, the exams that determined where one went to college were not signed, but numbered, and the anonymous graders determined your fate based, gasp, on how good an essay you wrote about the Renaissance and Reformation.

It outrages me that the government here is willing to spend four times as much on the education of a disabled kid of mine as they are willing to spend on a gifted one. An appropriate education should reward excellence and not simply help those who need it.