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We Should be More Selective
About Who we Send to College
We should be more careful who we send to college. The evidence is piling up that (1) We should have been paying a lot more attention to physical activity and what we eat and drink and (2) the mass production of college graduates has not made our nation a wiser and better country.
A new report says one third of U.S. children born in 2000 are at risk of diabetes. Black, Hispanic and Indian children are at even greater risk.
Their chances are one out of two. Why? Too much wrong food, too much food period and not enough exercise. I see the evidence of society's misguided priorities in young people and children every day. Lack of skin tone. No muscles. Slumped shoulders. Lots of extra pounds and rolls of belly fat on teenage girls who are otherwise still slim. No trip to the grocery store is complete without seeing overweight young mothers pushing baskets piled high with prepared foods and cartons of soft drinks to enjoy while they sit in front of the TV or computer. And everyone wants their kid to go to college so they can get jobs that don't require lowly physical labor.
Who wants their child to be a plumber, mechanic, carpenter or farmer! My child milk a cow, pound a nail, gather eggs or grow a backyard garden?! How quaint and old-fashioned!
When did we lose our common sense and develop a national culture of contempt for all the useful physical tasks that are the basis of life, and that still occupy the majority of American workers though we mostly ignore their existence? Possibly we have a nation overrun with lawyers, psychologists and social workers because we place a low value on the humble, essential tasks most people do. Everyone needs to feel important. What's so bad about wanting to be the best plumber or mechanic around? They may have the last laugh. The way things are going now, in a few years we'll have a nation awash in diabetics that don't know how to change a light bulb or do a simple home repair. The workers most in demand will be those who can DO something.
As a nation, we are also in denial of several facts: (1) The Wal-Marts and Home Depots are swallowing up the millions of little enterprises that built muscle, character and communities... and kept the fruits of their labor at home. (2) American jobs, including ever more high tech jobs, are steadily flowing overseas to low wage countries. (3) For the last decade or two, various levels of government have absorbed the excess of college graduates.
Now most governments have reached the limits of their ability to absorb. If everyone is a costly college graduate, where will they be employed? (4) And finally, the most unappetizing fact of all: Numerous studies have shown that most people are task-oriented. The vast majority of U.S. jobs coming up in the near future can be done by a well-trained 8th-grader. In fact, right at this moment more than half of U.S. college graduates work at something that does not require a college degree. Only about ten percent of high school granduates possess the intellect and analytical skills to be college material preparing for leadership and making decisions based on hard data and cause and effect.
If universities were less concerned with their moneymaking racket and PC indoctrination, and more devoted to developing the intelligence of worthy students into wisdom and the kind of true leadership we are sadly lacking, we would all be better off. The dumbing down of universities has resulted in common sense gone awry:
The forests are burning up and dying because of decisions made by college graduates.
Nothing is done about it because of lawsuits filed by college graduates.
Degreed experts such as Wally Covington and Dave Garrett whose recommendations are based on hard data and cause and effect are neutered and outnumbered by the mediocre masses spouting from their ivory towers.
Reality-challenged college graduates have decided that animals are more important than people and that wolves should roam free from Mexico to Canada.
Our useful jobs are vanishing overseas and we have a $435 billion trade deficit because of decisions made by college graduates.
Cultures, communities, friendly neighborhoods and livelihoods have been shattered by tunnel-vision dictates from the college-educated.
College seems to teach people to maximize paperwork and minimize action.
In many cases education has replaced on-the-ground observation and experience with endless meetings and airy theories.
Old folks are parked in nursing homes and babies abandoned to daycare through the mechanisms of an economy and culture manipulated by arrogant college graduates.
Clever college graduates have bankrupted our nation and many of its citizens through the policies they devise.
The U.S. Constitution is being trampled to death, and property and other individual rights it was designed to protect have gone with the wind by pompous decree of the degreed.
Large numbers of Americans are stressed and drugged and depressed, confused, empty and sick because the healing therapy of love for the soil, or pride in a humble task well done has been denied them by a patronizing clique of degreed opinion molders, and a culture of overbearing 'experts' who have undermined their faith in God and themselves.
Meanwhile we proclaim that "no child shall be left behind" while we purge the land of practical logging, family ranches and farms where kids grow strong and useful, small businesses and just about every other rural and small town occupation and enterprise that once produced the active, hardworking, entrepreneurial and community-minded spirit that made America special.
Yes, we really should be more selective about who we send to college. For what we spend on our institutions of higher learning, we could pay all the costs of that intelligent ten percent who are less at risk of losing touch with reality in college. Pay 100 percent for those who really belong in college whether they are rich or poor. The rest, many of whom would rather be doing something else anyhow, we could train and put to work re-creating an economy of essential production and service (before all the potential trainers have passed on).
While reducing the risk of early onset of diabetes, taxpayers would also benefit by reducing the risk of future obesity , drug use, gangs, crime and general uselessness among the present and future generations.
Our current unrealistic obsessions and repressions are undermining and wasting the genuine talent and potential contributions to society of millions of young people.
Payson.cc © 2003 Carrol Cox
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