I just watched Sarah Palin and Rudy Guiliani give their talks at the RNC. I was looking forward to Sarah’s speech most of all. Joe Biden’s balls are probably hurting in anticipation of Sic ‘em Sarah Barracuda ripping them off a month from now. My favorite part, however, was when Rudy nailed Barack on his voting record.

Since my senior year at UMass, I’ve been telling my students that the most important thing is to have an opinion. “Please, have an opinion,” I would repeat again, and again. So when Guliani called out Obama on his 124 “present” votes, emphasizing that the man couldn’t make the simple choice between yes and no, I had a moment of reckoning.

How is this man going to effect our already flailing education system? Ooohhhhhh boy would I love to just say “present” the next time Mr. Boss-man asks me for my opinion (Boss-man has such a crush on Obamarama). What the hell kind of example is that for kids these days, who are already growing up in a broken public education system where marking an answer as wrong in red ink is not allowed because it is psychologically damaging? Is voting yes or no such a big imposition that a new option, “present”, was needed? What bullshit. What’s next? Getting rid of letter grades in school, because it’s not politically correct to assign bulk values to unique individual snowflakes? Oops, we’re already doing just that.

I know he’s (Obama) not the only one to vote “present”, but as a presidential nominee, I expect more of a leader. Right or wrong, a leader is at the very least someone with an opinion. You cannot lead if you don’t have an opinion. Grrrrr

Thanks for the comments, everyone. This has been on my mind a lot recently. I’m still trying to figure out why someone like my mother, who I consider a very strong, hardworking, and intelligent person would believe that extending the government’s reach into healthcare and education will make a signigicant improvement on the whole. All I have been able to come up with is that it is not mere kindheartedness that causes many liberals to believe these things, but rather these people have a difficult time conceiving of the system being abused. A staunch conservative would say that such liberals have their heads planted firmly in the sand (though some would probably use coarser terms), but it is more than that: many of the liberals I know – family and close friends – have a lot of faith in the government and in the impovershed people. I think, perhaps, they have too much faith.

Yesterday, I discussed some of the ways the system is abused, for example the abuse of higher education by “kids” whose parents are paying for everything. This makes sense to me: when something is given for free, it loses its face value! Unless parents teach their children the value of higher education, their offspring will not value it, no matter how afluent or priviledged they are. I don’t see how throwing money at the problem will fix it, and I’m quite fearful that certain “free tuition for all” programs would have the effect of decreasing not only the quality of many institutions, but the overall value of higher education as well. Imagine if Lamborghinis were free and available to everyone, and also made very safe to the point where the driver is guaranteed not be harmed in a collision. What do you expect would happen to the accident rate? It would go through the roof, because drivers wouldn’t have to place a value on their car, or their safety. The same thing would happen with education – it would crash and burn!

I put some more thought into how we place value on things like education or our health, and I thought about that word, ‘value’. The first thing that came to mind was a discussion I had with the bf about economics. Money has no real value. The objects we buy with our money have value. In any exchange of money for objects, the price is set by what the object is worth to the buyer and seller. I thought about how this could apply to education.

College education is growing increasingly less respected and revered as a costly achievement. I see a lot of students who go to college because their parents are making them go, or because everyone else is going. For the most part, these kids have no idea why they are here, and they don’t value their degree beyond a simple piece of paper that supposedly means that they have been educated.

Not all liberals view education this way. I’d be willing to bet that many liberals in my parents’ generation place an extremely high value on a college education. But the product of the views that this education should be free and available to everyone are kids who think that the value of college is simply inherent in the act of showing up. And most of them frequently wont show up! I think this problem begins well before college, in affluent or privileged families, when the children aren’t made to understand that college, health, and a good quality of life are expensive things, but are costs that are worthwhile because we value them. An 18 year old who is given a full-ride to college can grasp the significance of this gift and can still appreciate the value of an education. I am also in no way saying that all those whose parents pay for everything in college are spoiled rotten children. Children learn to respect and value things at a much younger age in viewing the means to the end, and I believe that children at a young age grasp the means and link them to the value of the objective without first coming to an understanding of the objective’s true value. That being the case, what will our children think of higher education when we make tuition free? Not to mention, what on earth will happen to those educational institutions? Can you really imagine a national plan for funding public colleges that will work out well? I can’t! Not only does our government kinda suck at managing large institutions (ahem ahem, Walter Reed!), but tuition dollars help retain good professors and provide teaching resources.

As Sailorcurt pointed out to me, a big problem in many black communities is “thug “culture a.k.a. poverty culture: the belittling of achievement. The burdon of teaching children to value things like education falls on the parents. Sure, the government can help, is sometimes helpful when it comes to providing monetary support, but it is all for bunk if children arent taught to value the opportunities they are being given.

Please read Lissa’s post, I think we go to the same self-help group

I’d written a long, chore of a post under the same title way earlier, then personally negged it because I’m not very good and making my points eloquent nor concise.

As was inevitable, my mother read my blog, had an ulcer, and then told me that she didn’t like my labeling of the “left-wing liberals”. Then she called me “a right wing republican,” and I pointed out that she is just as guilty of tossing around labels as I am. She also told me that she was surprised to see that I had these oppinions because of “how I was raised,” and that I was “priviliged to be where I am in life” because I’m caucasian. We then proceded to get in an argument, with me saying that I very well could have decided to drop out of high school to have babies, smoke crack, and go on welfare, but I decided not to because I value education and self-responsibility.

So, Lissa, I don’t really know what caused us to veer right. If I had to guess, I would say that people like me and you, and many of the responsible gunnies I know, appreciate and value responsible behavior, and I feel like I’ve learned much about responsible and sensible modes of thinking and acting on the range. Combined with living on my own and providing for myself, learning that I could be responsible enough to shoot guns made me want to act responsibly in other ways, and it also made me value self-reliance.

I’m not harboring illusions that poor people should be expected to climb out of the gutter all on their own, but I really don’t think that throwing money at the poor is not going to be a very effective aid for upward mobility. I see examples of how steady cash flows have failed to produce responsible individuals every day. I work at one of the largest universities in the country (Hook ‘em!), and I am surrounded by A LOT of undergraduate students who hail from wealthy WEALTHY families. Maybe not rolling-in-it wealthy, but wealthy enough to afford tuition, plus house their kids in new luxory highrise apartments in West Campus. In my two years of working as a TA, I have observed that most of these kids don’t have a clue about personal responsibility and view their education here as if they were at “Camp College”.

The mother pointed out that college should be a worry-free time, but I don’t think that should mean a shirking of responsibilities. Sure, I skipped classes here and there, but if a person had called me out on it, I wouldn’t have responded in the flippant manner that I’ve received upon questioning my own students. An example from my first semester of teaching the analytical chem lab:

“Soooo, how would you find the pKa value?”

(blank stares)

“C’mon. Friday’s entire lecture was about this.”

(more blank stares)

“….Did any of you go to the lecture on Friday?”

(three hands out of 18 go up)

“Only three of you went to the lecture? Where were the rest of you?”

random student: (laughs) “It was a Friday!!!”

“Sooo, you guys generally don’t go to lectures on Fridays?”

more students: (laughing) “Nope!”

This was surprising to me, and it was surprising to my mother as well, to imaging that students who were privileged enough to attend such a good university would just waste the opportunity. I feel that this pattern extends beyond students at the university and is a sympton of a larger social epidemic. Like my students who were surprised that I expected them to attend lecture, my response to this behavior was to tell them that if they’re not going to show up to receive something that has been bought and paid for, then I won’t feel the slightest bit sorry for them if they flunk, except in that I feel sorry that they couldn’t imagine that flunking would be the consequence of their actions. Of course, not all undergrads here are like this, but I see a great many who are.

I think that to most of the educated, kind-hearted liberals – such as Lissa’s and my parents, – the idea that precious resources like money and educations would be frivolously spend and wasted is inconceivable. They don’t think that because they are stupid or have their heads up their asses, but because when they look around, they are surrounded by a lot of others, who, like themselves, would NEVER waste an education. I really, REALLY wish that was the case.

“Everyone wants to have a good education,” says one of my beloved fammy members. I clearly remember thinking the same way when I was her age. And then I realized that I was being indoctrinated by a lot of unfounded material that was based on feelings and not reality or logic, and I decided to call bullshit on it.

I miss you, Lissa! Let’s start a self-help group….Conservatives from Amherst, Anon.