Tom, Another thing I would like to add is that it seems to me that you are more likely to get bad ideas than good ones from a liberal arts education in most colleges these days. The same problems of ideological bias occur in both graduate school and kindergarten. If schools are going to indoctrinate people with socialist ideas, then the fewer years of education they get the better IMHO.

I can only guess what this author's agenda is. I think he wants people who have no particular talent for the liberal arts to be aware that if they if they follow the advice of their high school counselors and choose that route in university, they will most likely be less successful in life than they would otherwise have been. It is to say that our "one size fits all" public education system is not serving people particularly well.

The reason I posted this is that I think we are wasting extraordinary amounts of money trying to shove as many young people as possible into university, and that this is in NO ONE"S best interest.

He did not characterize FDR or anyone else as an "icon", but refers to "iconic stories". He does not in this article divide any of these stories into good guy of bad guy stories, so I think you can't tell what side of the fence he is on ideologically. Here is the full quote:

>>"Full participation in any culture requires familiarity with a body of core knowledge. To live in the United States and not recognize Teddy Roosevelt, Prohibition, the Minutemen, Wall Street, smoke-filled rooms, or Gettysburg is like trying to read without knowing some of the ten thousand most commonly used words in the language. It signifies a degree of cultural illiteracy about America. But the core knowledge transcends one’s own country. Not to recognize Falstaff, Apollo, the Sistine Chapel, the Inquisition, the twenty-third Psalm, or Mozart signifies cultural illiteracy about the West. Not to recognize the solar system, the Big Bang, natural selection, relativity, or the periodic table is to be scientifically illiterate. Not to recognize the Mediterranean, Vienna, the Yangtze River, Mount Everest, or Mecca is to be geographically illiterate.

This core knowledge is an important part of the glue that holds the culture together. All American children, of whatever ethnic heritage, and whether their families came here 300 years ago or three months ago, need to learn about the Pilgrims, Valley Forge, Duke Ellington, Apollo 11, Susan B. Anthony, George C. Marshall, and the Freedom Riders. All students need to learn the iconic stories. For a society of immigrants such as ours, the core knowledge is our shared identity that makes us Americans together rather than hyphenated Americans."

Don't you think high schoolers should have at least a passing acquaintance with all of these things? To know a bit about the Marshall plan, for example, so they can take an interest in what you have to say about it?

As for the "smoke filled rooms", wasn't FDR a smoker? I don't know who the author of this essay imagined to be in those rooms. I have to admit I kind of paused there too, because I couldn't understand what he was getting at. But I think it's safe to say that important decisions were once made by both politicians and businessmen in smoke filled rooms, because there was once a time when it wasn't illegal to smoke indoors (something many kids are not aware of, although they should be).

As for stripping philosophy out of higher education you may have a point; I think that ideally everyone should be exposed to philosophy. To make rational decisions and live well you need need to be able to think clearly and broadly, and philosophy gives you the tools to do that. However, when it comes to college level philosophy courses, I think the author is right to say that they are not for everyone. Here are his facts:

>>"When College Board researchers defined “college readiness” as the SAT score that is associated with a 65 percent chance of getting at least a 2.7 grade point average in college during the freshman year, and then applied those criteria (hardly demanding in an era of soft courses and grade inflation) to the freshmen in a sample of 41 major colleges and universities, the threshold “college readiness” score was found to be 1180 on the combined SAT math and verbal tests. It is a score that only about 10 percent of American 18-year-olds would achieve if they all took the SAT, in an age when more than 30 percent of 18-year-olds go to college"

Unfortunately not everyone can read and comprehend all of the major works of philosophy as effortlessly as you can, for example, and unlike you most people who are pursuing a liberal arts education find reading Locke to be quite a chore. Should they be compelled to do it anyway, by a system that pushes them into committing to three years of studies that they have no interest in? All of that at the expense of a prosperous and productive future, because they could have spent that time learning a trade? Wouldn't it be better if, as the author suggests, philosophy were taught earlier in broader strokes that people of all abilities can understand, so they can apply philosophy to the important decisions they will have to make later in life (such as who to vote for, for example)?

Sorry you didn't like the article. I thought it contained a lot of good info, that could help to shape the way people here at BTM might choose to communicate our freedom message to everyone in America (and not just to brilliant college grads).

What you described as your studies suggests that you received a strongly "classical" education and that is precisely what needs to be reinstituted in our system at all levels. Many people would be surprised by the fact that the classical model was our original educational approach, but it was subverted by those (one of whom you quote) using influence over the specially formed NEA. This created a system whereby the industrial age would have a sufficient supply of "fender bolter oners" and maintain a clearly stratified society.

This same dynamic also affected our medical educational model, implemented by the AMA, again having been influenced by people of the same Rockefeller camp. Apparently a need was felt to limit the numbers of medical practictioners, therefore the educational process was made much more stringent and expensive.

In both cases another quote is relevant, "Competition is a sin."