Rich Lowry gushes over Bob McDonnell, the Republican nominee for governor of Virginia, at National Review Online. Among the wonderful things McDonnell will do with a four-year term: “On education, he has pledged to award an additional 100,000 college degrees over the next four years, particularly in science and math.”
Wow. I didn’t know the governor of Virginia could award college degrees. But since he apparently can, why stop at 100,000? Let’s eliminate the colleges and universities altogether and have Richmond run the printing presses nonstop until degrees are manufactured for every resident of the commonwealth.
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“Let’s eliminate the colleges and universities altogether and have Richmond run the printing presses nonstop until degrees are manufactured for every resident of the commonwealth.”
Even problems outside of the monetary realm are being addressed with the same amount of hostility to reality. Why do human beings have such a hard time coping with situations that confront them? Why do we insist on wishful thinking instead of real solutions? Why such contempt for reality? Is it that reality requires hard work before the payoff? Delusional psychology has run rampant. Is it a result of some kind of cognitive dissonance or something?
Wiki had this to say on cognitive dissonance:
“An early version of cognitive dissonance theory appeared in Leon Festinger’s 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails. This book gave an inside account of belief persistence in members of a UFO doomsday cult, and documented the increased proselytization they exhibited after the leader’s ‘end of the world’ prophecy failed to come true. The prediction of the Earth’s destruction, supposedly sent by aliens to the leader of the group, became a disconfirmed expectancy that caused dissonance between the cognitions, ‘the world is going to end” and “the world did not end.’ Although some members abandoned the group when the prophecy failed, most of the members lessened their dissonance by accepting a new belief, that the planet was spared because of the faith of the group.”
This reminds me of the debt and easy money solution to an economy that was brought to its knees by these very things. Instead of recognizing the error, the economists and politicians compund the problem further by using the same methods.
A worthwhile idea. However, it would save a lot of time if the good Governor would simply submit a law to the Virginia State legislature which would simply and automatically declare everyone had a legal right to a “college degree” and confer one at birth.
Being successful at raising the portion of college “graduates” to 100%, The statute could then provide a model for subsequent Federal legislation. That bill–or something very much like it–introduced into Congress could then absolutely guarantee every citizen his “right” to education!
The additional advantages would include the fact that the hugh number of people consuming money and time working (so they call it) in so-called educational institutions could be employed far more usefully elsewhere where they would not be destroying the minds of the coming generation!
PEACE AND FREEDOM!!
David K. Meller
“Let’s eliminate the colleges and universities altogether and have Richmond run the printing presses nonstop until degrees are manufactured for every resident of the commonwealth.”
That’s essentially what has happened, in that almost everyone gets a degree yet little real education is taking place. However they cannot officially close the schools because then there would be thousands of teachers and administrators without a valid reason to collect a paycheck, there would be no more employment and bonuses for thousands of bankers who handle student loans, and there would no longer be an excuse to maintain tens of thousands of young people in the prime of their lives in poverty due to first being in school for 2 to 10 years and then being stuck paying off loans for 20 years afterward. So you see? The printing presses must run AND the colleges and universities must stay open.
The whole thing is like a gigantic Soviet steel mill with 100,000 employees and dependents which hasn’t actually produced any usable steel in decades. How can you possibly shut it down without admitting the utter failure and futility of the utopian dreams which led you to order its construction in the first place?
So who do we vote for for the Virginia 2010 elections?
mock the vote
You nailed it Ohhh Henry!
As an added bonus, you get to be labeled a failure if you don’t participate in this scheme.
Freedom Lover:
There is no one for us to vote for for governor in Virginia. Sucks to be us, doesn’t it?
Yes! We should start the quantitative easing of college degrees!
And after 10 years or so, you’ll need a Ph.D to work as a manager at Abercrombie and Fitch instead of just a bachelor’s degree.
Then we can have Tim Geithner address U.S. students and say: “Your U.S. degrees are very safe…”
It’ll be great, and we’ll all have a good laugh.
Ughh another terrible article from SM; seriously who allows this guy to post? This is another empty promise from a politician who with his political analysts garnered a potential gain of 100,000 student regardless of who is in charge.
The governor doesn’t decide grades or passes students.
This is a plea to mothers, & families to show a social agenda that the democratic party typical wins on.
KP, Mr. Oliva is simply pointing out the absurdity of Mr. McDonnell’s “promise” even if it weren’t an obviously empty one.
Caveman,
Olivia is implying that he is devaluing college degrees and handing them out like its the US dollar. That is not the case; and he’s trying to garner votes on the issue of education. There is not a single reference about the promise of 100,000 new diplomas so the quote can even be out of context.
How is McDonnell going to garner a 100,000 new diplomas; is magically going to accept 100,000 new students in the new four years? No this again is a ploy and anyone who has half a brain can see that this is just for talking points.
KP writes:
“How is McDonnell going to garner a 100,000 new diplomas; is magically going to accept 100,000 new students in the new four years?”
I believe this is the point of Mr. Olivia’s post. I may be wrong, but that is exactly what I took from it.
Since it happens this is in Virginia, I would like to point out that the horrible massacre at Virginia Tech may be partly due to a policy of packing the universities and colleges with as many warm bodies as possible and then pushing them along year after year toward a degree no matter how unsuitable or troubled some students are.
Cho had been accused of stalking. He had been ordered to take treatment. A prof requested that he take counseling. Would a private institution have wanted to bother with a troublemaker like this? Only a public institution which considers its services to be a “right” and which furthermore gets a grant of tax dollars for every person it enrolls would feel obliged to act as a nanny for someone like this.
“He had been ordered to take treatment.”
And we can see how effective such forced “treatment” is.
I’m not saying there is something in this, but the possibility of a link between massacres and antidepressants has been raised.
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