Posted on 06/15/2012 4:56:17 AM PDT by Kaslin
Ancient Sparta turned its conquered neighbors into indentured serfs -- half free, half slave. The resulting Helot underclass produced the food of the Spartan state, freeing Sparta's elite males to train for war and the duties of citizenship.
Over the last few decades, we've created our modern version of these Helots -- millions of indebted young Americans with little prospect of finding permanent well-paying work, servicing their enormous college debts or reaping commensurate financial returns on their costly educations.
Student-loan debts now average about $25,000 per graduating senior. But the percentage of youths 16 to 24 who are working (about 49 percent) is the lowest since records have been kept. The cost of a four-year college education can range between $100,000 and $200,000 depending on whether the institution is public or private. Only 53 percent of today's college students graduate within six years. Student time spent writing and reading in college has plummeted.
Annual tuition keeps rising, as it has over the last 50 years, usually at close to twice the rate of inflation. It must, if colleges are to pay for a vast new administrative class that is excused from teaching to monitor sensitivity and diversity, raise money, and comply with ever more race/class/gender federal mandates.
In addition, students support a new grandee class of professors who teach lighter loads, enjoy better benefits, retire earlier -- and now offer instruction in a vast array of courses and disciplines that simply were never part of the traditional curriculum.
If today's indebted students graduate later and are trained to be more "socially aware," they also have diminished writing skills, fewer facts at their command, and less practical ability to survive in the private sector. So the higher-education paradox continues: borrowing more for a less valuable, more politicized education that takes longer, with waning ability to pay off the ever greater debt.
Often, first- and second-year students will take most of their classes from the new legions of part-time lecturers, who are on yearly contracts without much in the way of job security, pensions, benefits or status, and who subsidize the light teaching loads of the far better paid.
But our contemporary version of Helotage gets even worse. Desperate students now jockey for summer "internships" at public and private consortia -- law firms, foundations, government bureaucracies and private companies. These internships neither pay much (if anything) nor necessarily lead to permanent jobs with the employer. They are not even quite medieval apprenticeships, which at least led to membership in a guild and future journeyman or master craftsmanship advancement.
At best, college students intern over the summer to hone "skills." But isn't that also a frank admission that standard college fluff such as a mandatory ethnic studies class, an Earth in the Balance course or a Construction of Manhood seminar is not seen by employers as proof of either erudition or marketable job skills?
So why aren't Americans more worried about our new Helots?
Society has all sorts of ingenious ways of disguising exploitation. Record numbers of broke graduates are returning home rather than finding well-paying jobs and establishing their own households.
With room and board subsidized by parents, indentured 20-something youths who are interning or working part time can still approximate the thin veneer of the good life -- possessing a car, cell phone and computer. The result is that college graduates without a job, a title or much income can appear affluent when they are on temporary leave from their parents' basements.
Baby-boomer parents -- the luckiest cohort in American history in terms of Social Security payouts, pensions and job compensation -- often grumble that they are now rechanneling their disposable cash to their kids. The idea of inheritance has gone from a death benefit for survivors to an ongoing living subsidy from mom and pop. Permanent cash supplementation to Helot children is a new twist in parents' retirement planning.
Overpriced colleges are rarely truthful about the new Helotage. For example, often they offer incoming students Club Med-like gym privileges: rock-climbing walls, aerobics and yoga classes, and hip weight rooms. Such glitzy distractions fool students into thinking that they are already part of the privileged classes -- without awareness that upon graduation, few of the newly indebted will make enough to enjoy commensurate perks at private clubs on their own dime.
Strip away the fancy degrees, the trendy fluff classes, the internships with prestigious employers and the personal gadgets, and a new generation of indebted and jobless students has about as much opportunity as the ancient indentured Helots.
Byline is wrong.
Victor Davis Hanson
Only Victor Davis Hanson would know what a “helot” was.
Good post!
Please remember that Sparta also used “Death Squads” aka a type of secret police to keep the Helots under control. They would target troublemakers among he Helots and come in the night and kill them.
The history channel had a very nice special on Sparta several years ago.
We are a slave society, and it's getting worse. The Political Elite have gotten better about making things look pretty, but we essentially labor on behalf of the Political Elite, and they live in palaces and think of us as peasants.
This is what FDR did during the New Deal. This is what public works are. This is what Obama did with his stimulus package. We think we live in a modern age, but we are nothing but serfs laboring for the folks living in the castle.
Helots arise, you have noting to lose but your room in your parents basement.
Exactly.
And the public employee unions are the gangbanger enforcers of this new feudalism.
Modern American government is nothing more then a protection racket, a regression to the feudalist barbarism of Europe in the middle ages.
This is everything the American revolution was supposed to have rejected.
All societies have essentially been slave societies. Aristocracy, Organized Crime, Fascism, Modern America -- the veneers are different, and sometimes pretty sometimes not -- but it's always been all the same.
There are other choices (the Founding Fathers proved this) but throughout history, most of the choices been along the lines of: "You don't don't like the color blueish-green? Okay, I have some greenish-blue, is that better?"
“Only Victor Davis Hanson would know what a “helot” was.”
Oh, some of us are old enough to have gotten an education in the classics even in high school.
My history teacher would berate us if we weren’t asking enough questions and just sat there taking notes:
“You slaves by nature! You intellectual Helots!”
Some of us are also old enough to have earned our retirements after forty or so years in the workplace.
By the way, I wouldn’t be a young person now for all the tea in China. Whoever said that youth is wasted upon the young had it spot on.
I believe Walter Brennan used the expression in the Gary Cooper movie, “Meet John Doe.”
I think that was the first time I heard the word.
I now have a new appreciation for the Walter Brennan character in “Meet John Doe”.
Except that in the Obama regime, the public works - those "shovel-ready jobs" - didn't actually happen. All that taxpayer money was blown, and the public didn't even get a Winter Palace or a pyramid.
I NEVER WENT INTO DEBT.
I was accepted for admission to one of America's great private medical schools. I turned it down. Couldn't afford to go there.
I was a millionaire at 40--multimillionaire at 43--retired on investments at 52.
Then I went back to college and studied all the things I loved. I LOVED IT! I LOVE STUDYING! I MADE A'S!
I NEVER WENT INTO DEBT!
I HAVE NEVER LIVED BEYOND MY MEANS!
TODAY MY FAMILY AND I ARE DOING JUST FINE FINANCIALLY! STILL LIVING WITHIN OUR MEANS. PLENTY OF MONEY FOR A RAINY DAY--OR A SUNNY ONE!
Note tagline.
Oh yeah.
I put my wife through 4 years of college--my children in expensive private schools and through college three times each--set up trusts for them and to send their children to college.
I established a scholarship program to enable indigent people to attend college. I don't know how many people I educated. Furthermore I insisted that there be no discrimination on the basis of anything except motivation and need--not race, age, gender, sexual orientation, prior criminal record, anything. This had nothing to do with law. It had everything to do with me.
Oh yeah! And when I wound up with around a hundred people working for me--I hired on the same nondiscrimination basis--men, women, an alcoholic, a functioning schizophrenic, a man with a criminal record, a man with AIDS, a man with advanced cancer. I was NEVER disappointed. (I was disappointed by one man who turned out to be of bad character, but that worked out just fine.)
The key to it all? Self-reliance!
At an early age I was in a mess, and I realized that there was only one person who could or would get me out of it: ME.
I did.
The rewards--obviously--were enormous.
Self-reliance is one of the most important things to know--and to teach.
This is one of the cruelist and most malicious things about the decadent, mendacious, cruel and malicious Left: it destroys self-reliance. And that's only one of many priceless things that the Left destroys.
My opinion of the Left could not be worse--obviously--and for good reasons.
I know a lot of college-age kids who bemoan their student loans, but drive brand-new vehicles. I’ve never in my life had anywhere near a $25,000 car loan, but they think nothing of it. But can’t pay a $25,000 student loan...
I had horrible student loans from law school and feel the law schools misrepresent what lawyers actually make. I went to one of the cheapest law schools in the country, so my loans were nothing compared to others.
However, it’s indecent that public university tuition is now so high. It’s now so high in some places that even living on ramen in a cardboard box, you can’t put yourself through without loans.
Thanks for the ping. A politically correct education is expensive and useless.
Thank you! You and my husband would have been like a good team or workhorses. His philosophy was the same as yours: “STAY OUT OF DEBT! If you want something badly, save up for it, then pay cash. If you have to do payments, pay them off as fast as you can. Be satisfied with ENOUGH.” etc.
I pay cash for cars and houses. No debt for me.
When the real estate bubble burst, all my real estate was paid for. I had paid $1,000,000 cash for a house, five years later sold it for $4,000,000, and two months later the bubble burst.
If I need a new car, I wait until I have the cash, then pay cash for it.
I've taught my children to do the same. They have no debts.
Another thing:
I never lend money.
If I can afford to lend it, I can afford to give it.
When my brother-in-law's asked for a loan to pay for his daughter's expensive dental work, I gave him the money.
When a friend wanted money to pay for "alternative health care", which frankly I thought was hare-brained, I gave it to her.
The converse is also true: If I can't afford to give it, I can't afford to lend it; so I say, "No." No arguments. No discussion. No guilt. To say no is not nearly as corrosive as to say yes and expect repaiment. I have no difficulty saying no when asked for a loan or a gift.
When the real estate bubble burst, all my real estate was paid for. I had paid $1,000,000 cash for a house, five years later sold it for $4,000,000, and two months later the bubble burst.
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Glad it worked out well for you.
A few years back, here in the SF Bay Area, many were cash-rich from their recently exercised stock options, and a lot of folks paid cash for their homes. They would have done a lot better if they had financed their home purchases, as that cash is now long gone and the underlying property worth a fraction of the purchase price.
It's said that the best earthquake insurance in California is a big mortgage. The lender takes much of the risk of ownership. If it's a purchase-money mortgage, the lender has no recourse other than to take title of the property. They cannot attack your other assets.
It's great to be able to pay cash for everything, but it does entail it's own risks.
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