The Erosion of Education as a Result of Federal Intervention

NEW ORLEANS, La. – In an attempt to look hip and salvage his ever-plunging approval rating, President Obama held his Twitter Townhall on Wednesday. Per usual, the solutions offered all rely on further interference by the federal leviathan. Despite a dismal record of accomplishment in every sphere the government has inserted itself, i.e. education, charity, retirement et al, President Obama did his best to convince the American people that THIS federal intervention will be different from all the prior abysmal failures.

One only need to look to the federal government’s monopoly on funding higher-education, which has resulted in the two-tiered consequences of saddling students with massive debt and a dumbing down of the college curriculum.

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike: When the President says [mimicking President Obama], Well, we all agreed that we’ve got to yank these kids out of the cornfields and get them in the classroom. And in order to do that we had to have a means to educate them. And to do that, well, we had to go public. And public schools have their problems and what have you, but they’re necessary, got to do it, when you hear this, what you’re hearing is a utopian vision. What it has produced is a dystopia. How many of you people know that dystopia is the opposite of utopia?

Now, I began this program talking about debt and deficit and how your new deck chairs in the Republican Party cannot get us out of this recession. Were fixing to enter recession number two now. We cannot get out of this recession using the old, oh, lets cut taxes and increase military spending. That is not going to work this time. The hole, the pit is too deep. The problems are too intrinsic. And they’re not just economic problems, they are problems of the soul. We have corrupt institutions at every level. At every level. And it is only because the federal monster, the federal Leviathan has compelled, forced, coerced, and inserted itself into every facet of our every affair, and done so, oh, but were going to make it better. Were going to have a utopia here. Oh, you just wait until we federally fund this, until our judges federally supervise your nitwit teachers and civic leaders, and until we one-size-fit-it-all everyone out there for our utopia.

Well, funny thing happened on the way to paradise. Here, here’s the President trying to explain this. And Ill give Obama credit for this. He was trying, you can tell when hes trying to be sincere, AG. And he was trying, he really was trying to answer this question. But the fact of the matter is that the man doesn’t know how because I don’t think anyone can answer this question. Roll the digital media file. This is from yesterdays Twitter town hall.

[Clip] President Obama: When America was making a transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society, we as a country made a decision that we were going to have public high schools that would upgrade the skills of young people as they were leaving the farms and start participating in a more complex industrial economy. When my grandfathers generation came back from World War II, we made a decision that we were going to have a G.I. Bill [Mike: Who’s we?] that would send these young people to college because we figured that would help advance our economy. Every time we’ve made a public investment in education, it has paid off many times over. [Mike: (Guffawing)] For us now to give short shrift to education [Mike: Is he kidding?] when the worlds more complex than ever, and its a knowledge-based society, and companies locate based on whether they’ve got skilled workforces or not, that makes no sense.

AG: Now, Mike…

[Clip from Billy Madison] What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things that Ive ever heard. At no point were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.

Mike: Okay. You had a question?

AG: I just before we played the clip you said you thought President Obama was trying to answer it sincerely.

Mike: I thought he was the first time I heard it. Maybe it was the 5:00 a.m., I still don’t have the sleep cleared out of my eyes and I need that third cup of coffee. Listening to it back just now going, oh, wait a minute, he wasn’t really trying to explain this.

AG: I mean, he seems to be talking in platitudes again and not really addressing the problems that exist in the public school system. I just didn’t take it as a sincere attempt to solve a real-world problem that America faces right now.

Mike: He doesn’t know how to answer the question is what I also said. And its apparent from listening to it, painfully listening to it again, AG, that he doesn’t know how to answer the question. Now, let me add this. There’s a couple things that I keep hearing, ladies and gentlemen, and these things are disturbing. You just heard Obama say [mimicking President Obama] Well, when America returned back from…. There is no America. There is these United States. There is no America. If there is, well, then, Canada’s on our continent. Mexico’s on our continent. Do they count as part of America? Mike, you’re missing come on, come on, its America. Used to be the United States. I mean, we’ve lost the concept of states. Totally lost it. Oh, but don’t worry about that, Mr. Church. You and your 18th-century [indiscernible] thinking, why, you’ve been proven wrong and wrong. Were so much better off that we consolidated everything. Oh, yeah. That’s working out so well for us. Citizens of Libtardia by their own admission here continue to point out the inadequacy of nationalizing things.

I also heard yesterday, I was watching Fox News, whoever is filling in in the morning this week because its a holiday week for most anchors or some anchors at Fox did a couple of news stories and was talking about, well, we have these problems in America. Just stop, we have problems in these United States. But yet we continue to insist that somehow were above world history, were above the way the rest of the planet has always worked, and were above what logic tells you is going to be the outcome of all this. Its not going to get any better because you’re going to use the same methodology. So you’re going to arrive at the same results. Garbage in, garbage out.

Now, I have this story from Michael Walsh at The Corner yesterday, The Credentialed Society. Were on the same subject. Started off with cheating in Atlanta public schools. If you’re just joining us, teachers rigging the test so they can continue to consume vast swaths of what other people have earned OPM, as I call it. The entire seven-page story is posted today at MikeChurch.com in today’s Pile of Prep. Go read it for yourself. Michael Walsh writing yesterday, National Review Online:

Leave it to John Stossel to bust up another perfectly good shibboleth: that college graduates will make oodles more moolah than their down-market coevals by the simple act of going to college. [Stossel] writes: Hillary Clinton tells students: Graduates from four-year colleges earn nearly twice as much as high school graduates, an estimated $1 million more. We hear that from people who run colleges. And its true. But it leaves out some important facts. That’s why I say: For many people, college is a scam. Oh, Stossel, are you correct.

I spoke with Richard Vedder, author of Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much, and Naomi Schafer Riley, who just published Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Wont Get the College Education You Paid For. Vedder explained why that million-dollar comparison is ridiculous: People that go to college are different kind of people (more) disciplined smarter. They did better in high school. They would have made more money even if they never went to college.

True, that, writes Michael Walsh, but that’s not the way things work in Liberaland, a cargo cult that firmly believes in the totemic value of parchment preferably, parchment with an Ivy League patrimony. That’s why self-made people like Sarah Palin, with her crummy journalism degree from Dogtooth State Teachers College, drive them nuts.

Their only definition of smart has to do with school and GPA. By their lights, someone like Andrew Lloyd Webber, who dropped out of Oxford after one term in order to become a composer, is a complete failure. And according to Frank Rich, he is.

Entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who got rich helping to build good things like PayPal and Facebook, is so eager to wake people up to alternatives to college that hes paying students $100,000 each if they drop out of college and do something else, like start a business. Were asking nothing in return other than meetings so we make sure (they) work hard, and not be in school for two years, said Jim ONeill, who runs the foundation.

For some reason, this upsets the Left. A Slate.com writer called Thiels grant a nasty idea that leads students into halting their intellectual development maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich. Or fail utterly, continues Walsh. Or live a meaningful, fulfilled life. Or go back to school some day in the future, when you can afford to tend to your intellectual development as an adult instead of a hormonal post-adolescent. Or for no reason at all. Anyway, Walsh writes, I thought Hillarys argument was that you got rich by going to college, not by spurning it to invent some cockamamie thing or other. But in the zero-sum game that is life to the Left, there’s only one way to play. After all, just look at the chief. And hes writing about Obama: Occidental, Columbia, Harvard Law what could possibly go wrong?

Now, what Michael Walsh is saying here, and what John Stossel is writing about, we’ve talked about over and over and over again on this program. And that is that college is a scam. It no longer produces the critical thinking and the critical thinkers that it used to. Why? Because that’s not what its programmed for. It is now programmed to consume tax dollars and crank out nitwits with degrees in advanced African studies or advanced women’s studies, whatever the hell that is.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

TheKingDude

Host of the Mike Church Show on The Veritas Radio Network's CRUSADE Channel & Founder of the Veritas Radio Network. Formerly, of Sirius/XM's Patriot channel 125. The show began in March of 2003 exclusively on Sirius and remains "the longest running radio talk show in satellite radio history".

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