Why did I go into $110K in debt for an education?

There is an issue in this country with education. I'm not talking about education with a capitol 'E' as in the Dept. of Education, or even the problems facing our schools or us fixing the system and become a leader in the world in terms of education. I'm talking about a basic belief that has come through clearly in this election that education is evil. While we say education is key to the future, we tell our children that if you want to be successful and happy you need an education, if you want to climb out of poverty or have options for a career you have to get an education. Everything about our individual and societal future depends on education.

So what's the problem? The problem is that because of disparate groups in this country galvanizing in the 1990's around the Republican Party, because they felt validated by the election of a president who did everything he could to endear himself to the American people by pretending he wasn't one of the wealthiest presidents from one of the most privileged backgrounds in our history, and lately by the Tea Party and their attacks on Barack Obama. Thanks to Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Christine O'Donnell and Sharon Angles, we now have a social and political narrative that tells us that if you are educated, if you are intellectually above average and successful because you are talented and innovative and intelligent, and if you have any inkling about the makeup of Congress, current events or READ, than you are elitist. Not only are you elitist, but you are out of touch with the rest of the country and unfit to lead in any legislative or executive office anywhere in the country. Because Sarah Palin couldn't name a single newspaper or magazine off the top of her head in the Katie Couric interview in 2008, because she couldn't handle questions from any news outlet except FOX News and the conservative media, everyone but those friendly stations became the 'Lame Stream Media'. Thanks to those and others, disseminated through the media exposure and organizing of the Tea Party movement over the past several years, being a person with an education in this country makes you of less value.

Now, it has been true for a long time that intellectuals are often targets for totalitarian regimes, for fascist societies and political movements. Intellectuals think about things, and argue things and talk to other people about things. When intellectuals then disagree with a movement or regime they have to be silenced lest they foster unrest that erodes that regime or movement's power base. If that regime or movement is overtly and ideologically oppressing their people or if they are enforcing policies that have a broad reaching negative impact, more and more intellectuals speak out against that movement or regime. That is what we have here and it gets more and more insidious.

One topic that floats out among social conservatives in this country, and it floats around on all levels of government, is about the administration of our public schools. A central aspect, philosophically, to this topic is the issue of teaching 'Intelligent Design', which in reality is another word for creationism, the teaching of biology through the Biblical narrative of God creating the Earth and universe and all things and all creatures. This has been a point of contention over and over again in local and state school boards with parents advocating its teaching in place of evolution, or at the very least as a 'viable' alternative to evolution. At the national level, one of the areas of the budget most Republicans are willing to cut, or at least they say this as they're campaigning, is the Education budget. Sharon Angles and a number of other fringe candidates even want to dismantle the Department of Education. Christine O'Donnell mentioned, in reference to teaching ID (creationism) in public schools, that all those curriculum decisions should be made on the local level, that everything should be on the local level.

There aren't general education standards in this country, despite all the testing to grade schools and districts on their proficiency rates. There are, however, standardized tests required by colleges and universities. Why? Because they want to see that a student is able to handle the academic requirements, that they are a desirable candidate for their school, and that they have long-term potential to become successful in the world, thereby reflecting well on their alma mater and donating money as an alum. Whether or not this is a major hurdle for students in this country based on race and socioeconomic status, it would only become that much harder when there is no nationally funded government agency to help support the administrative infrastructure for testing. It would only become that much harder by removing even the appearance of some national standard of education and putting curriculum on the local level.

Of course conservatives want the curriculum decisions to be placed on the local level. They want religious to conservatives to have more control over their kids' education, they want to have more control over the 'moral' or 'social' issues brought up in the schools. Evolution then wouldn't be the only thing for the chopping block. Another perennial issue is 'sex education', or what the rest of us know as health class. Effectively they probably would be most comfortable to return education in this country, and some have said this explicitly, to that of the 1950's. All of that is representative of the incredibly romanticized version of that period in history that many in this country believes in. They may want this for many reasons, too many for me to speculate, but the effect would be to indoctrinate all of our children in a worldview that isn't even recognizable to our modern world. It would ignore the empirical evidence of climate change and the effects of industrialization on the environment, convince children that industries have our best interests at heart as they cut costs to produce food more cheaply, all while promoting the idea that America is the greatest country in the world to the exclusion of everyone else, not just that we can but that we have the right to take unilateral action in the pursuit of our own perceived national interests.

Not incomprehensible is the connection between these conservative ideas of 'local' control and the religious fundamentalism that has become pervasive throughout the Republican Party. It has allowed people of generally less political knowledge, awareness on current events, and general education to congregate around some very well funded party leaders masquerading as outsiders. The rhetorical device of 'educated elite', especially representing them as all from New England, sits really well with working and lower class voters in other parts of the country, and especially in rural areas. These voters then were duped into trusting candidates whose own funding can be traced directly to insider political action groups and often directly to enormously wealthy individuals and corporations. Their own lack of political knowledge and savvy let them vote against their own interests in candidates who we are now seeing turn against some of their own campaign messages and a party interested in nothing but obstruction and further economic problems. At odds with this are the many labor unions who activated their traditionally Democratic base and supported Democratic candidates with money and people-power. These unions recognize the connections between corporate interests and financial groups and the deeply held principles of the Republican Party's conservative agenda antagonistic to the working class.

Where does that leave us as a country? Well, on climate change for instance, 151 nations signed the Kyoto Protocols back in the late 1990's. President Clinton abstained, as did India and China, because it called for a large reduction in fossil fuel emissions. That means that 151 nations, including all of the industrialized nations we call allies and who have historically stable economies and governments, recognize the threat of global climate change resulting from global warming and its involvement in destroying ecosystems and the environment. With every new Republican member of Congress stating during their campaigns they do not believe in global warming, and with several of them looking to hold public high profile hearings to prosecute the 'hoax' of global warming, how can we even think about being competitive in any meaningful way. When evolution, a central principle to all of science, the cornerstone of the field of Biology and it's resulting disciplines, and to the field of genetics so crucial to the fight of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's, how can we expect to progress in any of the sciences when it is not just questioned by our politicians, but policies put in place that discourage it from being included in classrooms and promoting religiously inspired doctrine instead?

Something that gives me hope, and something that has always made the socially conservative politicians in this country call academia 'liberal', is that in universities and colleges, you are required to prove your points by citing sources, defending sources, defending theories and hypothesis and the process you used to develop those from the evidence you collected. In science, for instance, you are required to present all of your evidence and facts in a structured way and cite any sources. If there is anything faulty in your research methodology, in the quality of the sources or in the logic in whatever argument you're making, your professor gives you a lower grade, talks with you about how you went about your work, or helps to correct errors to strengthen your work. Other fields of study follow similar methods, they call it critical thinking, and it requires you to think beyond just the words on a page, to develop connections and ideas with other material or sources you've read or encountered, and to argue your point in a clear and convincing way. We all have to go through this when we go through a college or university education. We all may not be at a school with the same level of academic intensity, not all of us are able to compete at the same academic level or are interested in pursuing a very academic career path or studies, but we are all challenged to learn and think beyond the superficial.

That is what really is at the heart of the whole idea of 'educated elite', which then translates to 'liberal elite', or if it's about a schism between Sarah Palin and the real Republican Party, the 'establishment elite' or 'Washington elite'. Somehow it's always about 'elite', and how the 'elite' is bad. Well, when you are dealing with multinational corporations, with international trade or political policy, when you are dealing with micro- and macroeconomic issues, with stabilizing and incredibly diverse economy and understanding the intricacies of a multicultural and multilateral approach to prosecuting a war, instead of just sending planes to bomb the hell of out whomever, don't you want the elite? Doesn't 'elite' mean the best, the highest order of whatever it's being applied to?

Of course some random housewife with a mediocre education and no policy background will never be considered to be qualified to become president. Running the nation isn't anything like running a household, despite whatever she might say. Stabilizing the world's largest economy during major global economic uncertainty is nothing like balancing a family checkbook or paying household bills. No, 'common sense' solutions have absolutely no place in Washington, D.C. because that's where we want the smartest, brightest, most talented people in the fields of economics, political science, law and international trade to be and to be working. Sarah Palin is a million miles from any of that. And if an ignorant housewife with no business experience and who has no political skills at all other than being an agitator within her own party can become president, then what the hell did I take on $110K in student loan debt for?