Posted on 07/22/2015 1:29:25 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Sometime in the slew of Republican debates to come, a journalist will lock eyes with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and, in tones of gravamen laced with condescension, demand to know whether his lack of a college degree disqualifies him for the Presidency. Walker is likely to reply, as the better part of tactical wisdom indicates he should, with a cocktail of populism and anti-intellectualism.
The more admirable response would be a paean to elitism lost. Virtually no one in public service today, including most of the degree-holding candidates with whom Walker will share a stage, possesses what would actually be useful for the endeavor: a classical political education that cultivates the Aristotelian and Burkean virtue of prudence.
This is not, to a certain extent, their fault, since few institutions still provide one. When Walker says he got into college largely to get a job and got out early to take one, he speaks for the vocational ethos that governs higher education today. It is the product in no small part of political rhetoric that encourages universal college in the same tones in which it speaks of universal preschool: as the pathway to prosperity.
Education as an End, Not a Means
It was not this way at James Madisons College of New Jersey, later Princeton, or the candle-lit cabin in which the self-schooled Abraham Lincoln read Bunyan and Shakespeare. These were educations in pursuit of beauty and truth. Along the way they formed citizens and statesmen.
Graduates of the nascent Princeton could translate Virgil and Tully with facility, because doing such was a condition of admission. Between freshman and senior year they studied authors ranging from Xenophon to Cicero to the cutting-edge Scottish common-sense theorists. The gamut of topics included theology, moral philosophy and natural philosophy.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
Nowadays “higher education” is poisoned with anti-American dogma.
Probably better off without it.
Were Gravamen those rock creatures in the Noah movie?
Because I thought they were pretty lame.
I don’t care about his education. I care about his flip flopping. #CruzOrLose
One of our most educated President was Woodrow Wilson, a Ph.D and Princeton University President.
He was the one who gave us :
1) World War 1
2) The Income Tax
3) The League of Nations.
4) The Treaty of Versailles ( Which many argue was a major cause of WW 2 ).
I once knew someone with a Ph.D. from Princeton who couldn't read his own diploma, because it was written in Latin.
Jimmy Carter was well educated. He graduated in the top 10% of his class from the Naval Academy. He served on a nuclear submarine. He was a naval officer.
But was he a fine president???
Sarah Palin’s detractors also seem to think that her lack of a Phi Beta Kappa pin from an Ivy League school disqualifies her for the presidency.
Nowhere in the US Constitution does it say a president needs to be a college graduate. Only the arrogant media, pseudo-intellectuals and the dims are offended by “Walker the commoner”.
And Ronald Reagan went to tiny Eureka College, a place which the bi-coastal liberals have never heard of, and thus, accord no prestige to.
I have a classical education (Greek and Latin) , and I have never referred to Marcus Tullius Cicero as "Tully."
Lol
Yeh keep telling yourself that. LOL!
Clinton was/is a Rhodes-scholar...
I hope we lose then.....how depressing.
I also know Ted Cruz is the best candidate.
Thanks for the link but they failed to mention that Graybeard58 never got a college degree either, who yet lived his whole life (so far) generally happy and healthy lo these seventy years.
The headline is false. It infers Walker never went to college. In fact, he was 30 credits short of his degree when he left to accept a job. he was married with a child on the way, or at least that is what I read somewhere.
The headline should say he has no college degree.
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