April 8, 2012 - 2:30 pm
I went to the Santa Monica College campus following the Pepper Spray Incident, to ask the students if they had any responsibility to pay for their own education…or healthcare…or housing…
Here is what they had to say: 
This is what the culture of liberalism has done to today’s youth.
Knowledge is free, it’s called a library.
Also, you can get a free education, it’s called the GI Bill.
Shame on the parents of these kids for not instilling a sense of values and work ethic into their children.
Where’s my Mommy? I need her to take care of me, to hold me and hug me and protect me from the realities of the real world. Good grief.
But the tradition for many, many years in California was that the community colleges *were*, in effect, free. And the state university (Cal state, not UC) was very nearly free as well. In both cases you paid for books, and the most minor tuition. And parking. And meals. And room and board. But the classes were the next thing to free.
And even UC cost a third or less than private colleges.
Did nobody talked to by PJTV have anything else to say?
You know what else use to be free, kids? The corvee. Keep on demanding free stuff, and you’ll eventually end up in one of some kind–”justified because of all society has done for you….”
To note: I’m not saying I want one, I’m just saying eventually someone is going to hi-jack you for two years and waste a whole lot of your youth doing a whole lot of nothing, if you don’t watch it. And don’t say it can’t happen, because the folks who like to give you “free” stuff have already proposed it, and keep doing so.
Free is when you don’t have to pay for nothing or do nothing
We want to be free
Free as the wind
—Frank Zappa, from the song Teenage Wind
Ol’ Frank saw this coming decades ago.
“It’s a miserable Friday night. I’m so lonely, and nobody’ll give me a ride to the Grateful Dead concert! Oh, rats!”
But ask any one of them about drugs and suddenly it’s “You can’t tell me what to do! I’m an adult!” Yeah, after saying “Pay for my housing, food, health care, education and transportation,” they’re suddenly adults when it comes to hedonism.
Also: I’m pretty sick of hearing the name of Robin Hood being slandered. He was fighting taxation; fighting for people to keep their own hard-earned money.
Remember, the anthem of these socialist hedonists tends to be “Imagine”, and even the guy who wrote that song found it to be unbearable naive claptrap in his later days.
Considering that “Imagine ” was on Double Fantasy, Lennon never had the chance to seriously regret the sentiments expressed. He got shot, in case you don’t know.
It was not on “Double Fantasy.” (Unless you have some sort of rare Uzbekistan version that none of the rest of us have ever heard of.) It was released in 1971, on the album called “Imagine.”
…In case you don’t know.
The land of the freebie and the home of the crave.
Santa Monica College- home of the intellectually feeble.
Here’s an idea: Let’s base each SMC professor’s salary on what their students are willing to pay for a “free” education. And then use the threat of incarceration to force these professors to fulfill their classroom obligations based on that notion of “free university educational rights”.
I can just hear the protest chants now: “No free instruction means incarceration”.
I vote for your idea.
Teaching is integral to interstate commerce. Therefore it should be provided “at no cost” to the consumers – parents, students, taxpayers, non-taxpayers. Reimbursement for services will be set (capped) by the Federal government. Those deemed part of the teacher pool who refuse to participate in educational commerce will be fined (not taxed) a minimum of $2000. Payable to the IRS Brownshirts pounding on your door.
Now let’s talk about textbooks and educational media. Educational media is integral to interstate commerce …
The “Arab Spring” began with the self-immolation of an unemployed Arab engineer working as a fruit seller after being verbally insulted by a female government employee.
Setting aside shame-based Islamic male delusions of honor and Islamic contempt for women, this Third World event contains an important lesson for First World societies with large Third World minorities.
Most American students attending college don’t need or really want a college education. College has become an American rite of passage. A job requirement. A ticket to the middle class. Research and study as a response to intellectual curiosity–learning for the sake of learning–is a concept beyond the grasp of of a most American college students.
The students can be forgiven their ignorance. Their parents are semi-literate, government-dependent, credit-card-indebted, television-addicted peasants. Their teachers are incompetent union hacks.
Students from Third World countries are compelled to go abroad for an education. This impediment limits the number of students seeking higher education and focuses those fortunate few on practical, technical, courses of study. Not so American college students. Core curriculum is dead in America. For most American students, college consists of four years of lazy class discussion on subjects of interest only to naive eighteen and twenty years olds and their equally shallow and immature, if somewhat older, instructors and professors. Nothing practical is gained beyond middle class manners and an absurd illusion of intellectual and cognitive ability. Meanwhile, finding a competent American electrician or plumber becomes ever more difficult.
There is danger to wildly raising young peoples’ expectations with no hope of fulfillment. The seething frustration and revolutionary ferment among European and American educated young people in the Third World should be a caution to Americans.
That the Obama administration enthusiastically recommends college education to millions of students who don’t belong in college and can’t begin to pay for it is hardly surprising. Barak Obama and presidential appointees like Eric Holder, Susan Rice and “Van” Jones are affirmative-action products of the abysmally corrupt education system they are promoting. Of all the stupid and plainly dishonest lies foisted on the American public by the Obama administration, none is so dangerous as the promise to millions of young Americans of a good job at the end of four years of worthless American college education.
Here and there in America there are still tiny pockets of sanity where honest metrics are applied. Admission to the “science high schools” in New York City is determined by one comprehensive test given one day a year, open to any New york high school student who wishes to take it. Two of my kids attended Stuyvesant High School and for several years,I spent a great deal of time there. I would estimate that no more than two or three percent of the student body was African American–this in a modern, sophisticated city where minorities comprise the majority and middle class African Americans abound. In a week spent on the grounds of post-affirmative-action UCSD last year–a huge campus serving several colleges, an engineering school, a medical school and an oceanographic institute–I counted all of five African American students.
College for everyone is the educational equivalent of open borders. Sealing our borders should be the first task of an incoming Republican administration. That done, the new administration would do well to de-fund and shut down half the colleges in the nation.
“EVERYTHING FREE IN AMERICA”
America, West Side Story, 1957
I propose a foreign exchange program where these students pick over giant mountains of garbage in Guatemala City or bring chunks of sulphur down Indonesian volcanoes until their shoulders are deformed. No reason, really – I just would like to see them suffer and never come back.
Liberalism has become the new cargo cult. You don’t have to work, just believe and the benevolent John Frum shall give you everything you want.