Posted on 02/20/2015 4:35:21 AM PST by SJackson
That Wisconsin Governor and GOP presidential hopeful Scott Walker never graduated from college renders him ineligible for the office of the presidency. Or so says such critics as Howard Dean when they suggest that Walker is insufficiently educated for the position.
I have multiple degrees, including a doctorate degree. For the last 16 years, I have taught philosophy at an array of universities and colleges—four-year and two-year, research-oriented and teaching-oriented, public and private, big and small—from Texas to New Jersey.
And I can assure you, the mere possession of a college degree most definitely does not certify that its holder is “educated.”
Though there are always exceptions, the painful truth of the matter is that the contemporary academic world has long since decided against supplying students with an education into the traditions of Western civilization. Instead, it has made up its mind to provide them with training in an ideology, namely, the prevailing leftist ideology better known as “Political Correctness” (PC).
Between “training” and an “education” there is a world of difference.
Those who are trained in an ideology will master all of the stock phrases, clichés, and conventionalities of that ideology; but they will master nothing else. For example, you can bet the bank that it will be axiomatic to many—most—college students that such things as “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “imperialism,” “colonialism,” and “classism” are unmitigated evils. For this reason, it’s just as much a sure bet that these same students couldn’t so much as begin to formulate an argument for any of these beliefs—or for any others, for that matter.
Training in an ideology is training in propositions that are treated as either self-evident or as following from self-evident propositions. The ideology is dogma.
However, because an ideology is an abstraction of reality—a Readers’ Digest version of it, so to speak—it is, at best, a distortion or caricature of the real world.
And the ideology that reigns on today’s campus is a distortion—a gross distortion—of “the real world” of Western civilization.
Unlike their counterparts from yesteryear, the image of Western civilization that’s promoted in many liberal arts and humanities departments throughout the country has all of the depth of a puddle. The West has been reduced to an uninterrupted exercise of villainy begetting villainy, its unprecedented theological, philosophical, and literary achievements summarily dismissed as the function of “white male privilege.” The evils for which human beings the planet over have been guilty from since time out of mind are presented as being unique to the West—when in fact it is typically the case that the West is unique only insofar as it alone among the peoples of the world has gone to great lengths to stamp out these evils.
Yet while the PC ideology that’s being forced upon contemporary students is at once false and socially destructive, the point here is that, content notwithstanding, college students should not be trained in any ideology. To replace education with training in an ideology is to insure that students’ minds languish in a poverty of imagination, a state of affairs that at once results from and contributes to their alienation from their own civilization.
In short, training in an ideology denies students precisely those resources that they need in order to think.
But it also denies them the ability to genuinely, reasonably, feel.
When the great 20th century philosopher Hannah Arendt witnessed the trials of Nazi war criminals in Israel, she noted a curious phenomenon, what she called “the banality of evil:” Most of the defendants, though responsible for wicked deeds, weren’t themselves particularly wicked themselves. However, they distinguished themselves by “a curious, but quite authentic inability to think.” That is, they had their “clichés, stock phrases,” and “conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct,” but the defendants were either wholly incapable of or unwilling to think beyond their script.
What’s true of the Nazis is no less true of anyone else—or at least of those who have nothing more than training in an ideology.
As I write this, and as his Democratic opponents pounce on Scott Walker for his lack of a college “education,” Marie Harf, the deputy spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, has just said that a “lack of opportunity for jobs” is among “the root causes” that account for the rise of such “extremist” groups as the now notorious “Islamic State.” In reply to the fury of incredulous responses that her remarks invited, Harf commented that hers “might be too nuanced of an argument [.]”
This, though, is exactly the problem: her argument is not nuanced. It’s all too simple. It’s formulaic. Actually, Harf hasn’t made an argument at all. She wouldn’t think to make one, and may not even know how to do so.
And this is because, for all of her college degrees, Harf, like her boss, Barack Obama, (evidently) sorely lacks an education.
She does, however, like millions of American college students, have training in an ideology.
Democrats are making an issue out of Scott Walker not finishing college because they are upset he wasn’t corrupted by the liberal ideology taught in the institutes of higher learning. They just didn’t have enough time to warp his brain and it bugs them.
On the other hand:
Cruz attended high school at Faith West Academy in Katy, Texas,[33] and later graduated from Second Baptist High School in Houston as valedictorian in 1988.[18] During high school, Cruz participated in a Houston-based group called the Free Market Education Foundation where Cruz learned about free-market economic philosophers such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Frédéric Bastiat and Ludwig von Mises.[27] The program was run by Rolland Storey and Cruz entered the program at the age of 13.[25] In 1987 when Cruz was 17, authorities found an unopened case of beer in his vehicle, resulting in a ticket.[34]
Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy[35] from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1992.[7][6] While at Princeton, he competed for the American Whig-Cliosophic Society’s Debate Panel and won the top speaker award at both the 1992 U.S. National Debating Championship and the 1992 North American Debating Championship.[36] In 1992, he was named U.S. National Speaker of the Year and Team of the Year (with his debate partner, David Panton).[36] Cruz was also a semi-finalist at the 1995 World Universities Debating Championship, making him Princeton’s highest-ranked debater at the championship.[37][38] Princeton’s debate team later named their annual novice championship after Cruz.[37]
Cruz’s senior thesis on the separation of powers, titled “Clipping the Wings of Angels,” draws its inspiration from a passage attributed to President James Madison: “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Cruz argued that the drafters of the Constitution intended to protect the rights of their constituents, and the last two items in the Bill of Rights offered an explicit stop against an all-powerful state. Cruz wrote: “They simply do so from different directions. The Tenth stops new powers, and the Ninth fortifies all other rights, or non-powers.”[32][39]
After graduating from Princeton, Cruz attended Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1995 with a Juris Doctor degree.[7][40] While at Harvard Law, Cruz was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review, and executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review.[6] Referring to Cruz’s time as a student at Harvard Law, Professor Alan Dershowitz said, “Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant.”[19][41] At Harvard Law, Cruz was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics.[42]
Cruz currently serves on the Board of Advisors of the Texas Review of Law and Politics.[42][43]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz
Now that is many times a better resume than obama’s.
We don’t know anything first-hand about Mr. Obama’s college years. Nothing. OTOH, there are hundreds if not thousands who can step forward and testify to Senator Cruz’s accomplishments and intelligence.
I think Ms. Harf should parachute into Raqqa and offer this guy a job.
It doesn’t matter what creds someone has. The narrative and meme are out there:
“Democrats smart, Rethuglicans STOOPID!”
And the millenials will bleat it like the sheep they are.
Bill Gates dropped out of college.
Today 45 years later, he would probably not stand a chance of achieving what he did because he could not get his foot in the door with managements over emphasis on education achievement.
Oh, he had one other saying, almost Dirty Harryish: A wise man has to know his limitations.
What would you think of a Walker / Cruz or Cruz/Walker ticket? Both are terrific.
I see the madman with the beard uses the same hand sign that Obama used the other day at his muslim get together.http://ibloga.blogspot.com/2015/02/obama-and-muslim-gang-sign-shahada.html
bookmark for later read, looks good
Marie Harf needs to go home, take off her clothes and start popping out children, she’s worth nothing more than that.
However, one would have to question the value of her offspring. While a low IQ is not necessarily a genetic trait, her children would most likely be as stupid as she is.
I’m getting bad vibes about Gov. Walker’s stands on amnesty and immigration. He needs to clear that up, and fast!
Walker had better bone up on his history and science trivia. they’re going to be hitting him with a barrage of trivia to prove he’s uneducated, like they did to Henry Ford in his lawsuit trial, when the defense attempted to prove he was a moron.
It's been that way for as far back as I can remember and I'm old.
Plus, "the evil republicans are going to cut off grandma's social security".
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