No more of that. They’d burn you at the stake. The more prestigious the college, the bigger the fire. A two year community college is a better place to get educated.
For all the humanities and liberal arts stuff, commute by train or bus, and read until your stop. That’s how I went through Shakespeare, Pound’s Cantos, studied ancient Greek, Arabic and lit crit, and something really long and boring by Wordsworth about how he became a boring—I mean great—poet.
That’s a good way to go, even if you need a degree and have to go through college. Most of what I have learned that is truly worthwhile, I learned on my own, or maybe on a job. I have always been a reader, and I went into college with a firm foundation of what I believed. I don’t know if a lot of young people have that and, if they do, it gets undermined by the pressures of college. For all of the talk about diversity, diversity of thought doesn’t count, I guess. That can produce nothing but a stagnant society full of stagnant people.
A friend of mine was one of the best-educated people I met. As a young man, he started school to train for physical therapy, but had to quit because he got married and the kids started coming. He worked as a bread truck driver. But he read voluminously, taught himself Russian and Old Slavonic, and liked to translate old Russian books into English as a hobby. On top of that, he had tons of valuable experience from life. We used to sit up late into the night and talk about issues great and small.