[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]smh23 wrote:
Note that I didn’t say anything about “intelligence” or even IQ level. I mean “educated” in the narrowest sense of the term–having attained a certificate of education. I’ve spent a lot of time at institutions of higher education over the past half decade and I would be the absolute first to admit that they readily abide half-wits and stupidity.[/quote]
I know what you meant, but I did want to make the point, lol. I think (and this could be a whole thread in itself) that this is part of the reason we are in the mess we are in re: jobs and employment. College has become big business and dropped standards. People that had no business getting past freshman year in 1965 are now being handed master’s degrees.
Well, for it to add a compelling reason, it would ignore a large tenant of being a true conservative in the first place. Everything starts with the individual, and individual responsibility is paramount to conservative ideology being successful.
So, if you add up the loosing standards, the liberal leaning of the professors and administration, and the inherent ‘collective’ nature of college and it sort of explains itself. Because, again, someone doesn’t have to be poor in order for my original logic to work. They only need to believe they are poor, some how oppressed by those with more, or owe their success to something other than their hard work (government in this case.)
Look at affirmative action. It pushes people through the system, and therefore any success they have, they will likely give credit to the government. Now if the programs pulled people up, they would have to have individual accomplishment and get a reward for success, which would have them giving themselves credit rather than the government.
Right now a black kid applies to college, and the college pretty much has to take him or is otherwise allowed to take him irrelevant of qualification (this is completely separate from the lazing standards in college in general, one did not cause the other). When the system should be that there are hard line qualifications needed to get into a school. When a minority meets those qualifications they pay less/get free room/grants/etc.
Statistically minorities and poor people have less advantages, so it is harder for them to get to college. Pulling them up and rewarding hard work will produce a love for individual responsibility and respect for the government. Pushing them develops a love for the government and doesn’t foster any respect for self. One needs to triumph over suffering to love one’s self.
So it would stand to reason, that is isn’t that conservatives want to undermine education, but rather change it. People that complete college courses vote D, I would imagine the spread of IQ is relatively even between the voters.[/quote]
I think you’ve done a good job of dissecting this. I am in a rush now but I’ll go through it and write a reasoned response later. For now, a quick note: when you add complexity and detail to an analogy, i.e. as an analogy approaches reality, it tends to break down. You’ve put forward a compelling case for why conservatives want to change the school system.
But the original premise, and the one which was in my view a decent analog to beliefs about Obama’s motives that were put forth earlier–that Republican politicians must be actively discouraging higher education because doing so would afford them a direct political advantage–remains unproven. Indeed it will remain unproven because it is false.
The analogy can work (and by that I mean lead to an insupportable conclusion) on other levels. For example: men tend to vote for one party relative to women, so therefore it stands to reason that that particular party would do everything in its power to discourage women from voting or, at an even more ludicrous extreme, to reduce the number of women living in the country.
The point here is that this notion of Obama and the Democrats consciously working against upward mobility–a notion often taken on faith around here–is not sufficiently supported by the logic given in its defense.
