In 1974, I graduated from high school. My parents couldn’t afford the $4000 it would have cost for me to go to college for 4 years, and there weren’t the grants and loans available like there are today, so I had to find an alternative, because with a $2 minimum wage that I was earning as new entrant into the work force, that wasn’t going to get me there. So I joined the Army and twenty years later, I graduated from college. I took college courses while I was in the Army at night on my scant free time and lucked out with an assignment to the University of Vermont which paid for six credit hours per semester, so I had three years of credits behind me when I retired and took three semesters at SUNY Oswego to get my bachelors degree.<\/p>\n
Even though I was the same age as most of my professors, and despite the fact that I had tons more real world experience than most of them, I bit my tongue a lot to keep out of trouble. I understood my role as a student, and their role as a teacher. Unlike many of the students that I see on my television screen these days, whining about “safe spaces” and the universities’ responsibility to “protect” them from differing opinions and the free speech of others.<\/p>\n
I’ll admit that I spoke up when my teachers were absolutely wrong about things I knew to be true, but mostly, I just played the student while they played the teacher. I knew that my goal was to graduate, that any “socialization” which they had planned for me would fail because I was nearly forty and knew how the world worked. I also knew that if I took a test, and if I wanted to pass it, I had to take that test from my teachers’ perspectives, not from the perspective of my real world experience.<\/p>\n
I was subjected to the political biases of my fellow students as well as my teachers. I was a minority on campus, being a veteran and nearly twice as old as my student peers. There were no “safe spaces” for me. Even while I was teaching at UVM, I was called a “baby killer” as I crossed campus in my uniform. Some group of misguided souls threw a bucket of red paint on our door to symbolize the blood on our hands, you know, even though few of us had ever heard a shot fired in anger. The University moved our office off-campus because students and faculty were offended by our presence there (I see that the ROTC office is back on campus there now).<\/p>\n
I guess my point is that the crybabies I see on TV these days haven’t been taught properly what their role is as a student. Their demands for everything from “safe spaces” to free tuition is intellectually vacant. I probably would have squandered my parents’ money if I’d gone to college in 1974, back before I found my place in the world – I was mostly an idiot when I was a teenager. Not much different than the parade of fools on the news channels today. Yeah, I wanted free college, but, nothing is really free, is it? I paid for my “free college” with my youth and my labor. I graduated from college in December 1994 debt free, but only because I’d paid for it up front. <\/p>\n
Basically, I learned nothing in college that I didn’t already learn in high school twenty years before, mostly because the universities have become diploma mills, churning out graduates like manufacturers. College education is now a business because, for some reason, everyone thinks that they need a college degree and the schools are more than willing to rubber stamp students’ foreheads while turning out an inferior product. They have made-up degrees in Wymyns’ Studies and Underwater Basket Weaving, getting credit for classes that are more pornography than actual studies.<\/p>\n
This bullshit about being owed a free college education won’t improve education in this country. As it is, high schools have pretty much stopped educating students because they pass on their morons to the university system. That’s why many college freshmen are taking remedial reading, writing and math courses before they’re allowed to take college-level classes – an extra semester that mom and dad have to pay for, which is good for the university, money-wise. <\/p>\n
The education system in this country is badly broken, and one of the big reasons it’s broken is because the inmates think that they’re qualified to run the asylum. The universities caving to the students’ vacant demands aren’t helping – but they’re money-making machines, so what do they care?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"