americanorwell

SHOULD YOU GIVE YOUR KIDS A COLLEGE EDUCATION OR A GUITAR? Or boxing gloves? Or dancing lessons? Or a football? You want to avoid crushing tuition debt because it is not “dischargable”, thanks to a neat double-cross by Congress. And since most degrees now are in business and accounting you're not going to get much bang for the buck from an English degree or teaching credential or, heaven forbid, a theology or Classics BA. Politicians can't help you because they only represent themselves. I saw that famous shauspieler Bill Clinton intone that kids have to buckle down and study math and science. Of course when he took physics and the assignment was to “dress the electron” he tried to “undress the electron”, failed and gave up. At Stanford an undergraduate degree can cost up to $200,000. No wonder Steve Jobs and Bill Gates dropped out of college and Elon Musk left Stanford after two days. My extremely well-read son Tony dropped out of a swank private college to get to New York and get a job at The New Yorker. Later, he did get a degree from NYU but he said astutely, “Why are we paying thousands of dollars to read books I can do on my own?” Of course you can always get a football scholarship while you're taking remedial reading and waiting for the NFL Draft. But that's for schools like the University of Memphis and East Louisiana State A&M. I didn't need college to be smart or to have a career but my father, who never finished high school, insisted, and he was writing the checks. So I was sent off to UCLA . The first thing I did was join a fraternity since I was 1500 miles from home. I wasn't a scholar but I got my A's in Russian and English and earned 5 athletic letters (in minor sports of course). John Dewey points out that “education is a mode of social life in which we learn the most by working with others”. I left Berkeley with my gentleman's C average and the biggest prize of all, my wife Peggy. In the 1971 film “Taking Off” Milos Forman spoofs the middle class by having the young daughter run away from home. She returns with her goofy-looking boyfriend. The smug father, who has never made more than $19,000 in his life, baits the young man, who is a rock musician, by asking how much money he made that year, and got the answer, “only $237,000”. If you want to make real money don't let college stop you. Today's university has pledged itself to a Holy Trinity of: football for the alumni, sex for the undergraduates, and parking for the faculty. However, if you change your mind (and actually care for it) you can harken to William James who said, “Learning of all kinds opens us up to the fruits of life. The American college is too important to be permitted to give up on its own ideals.”