Making America Great Again Isn’t Just About Money and Power – The New York Times

No, it’s about education.  Here is my comment.

Op-Eds like this are insightful, well thought out, and well argued, but – and it’s a gigantic “but”, with a gigantically hard solution – what proportion of today’s voters will ever hear this argument, or even understand it if they did? And why?

Let’s skip the obvious answer to the first question and get to the second one: why can’t they understand?

The answer is easy if you have been a professor for over three decades, paying attention, and care.

Starting at about the end of Johnson’s presidency – whose “Great Society” I also support – our system of higher education has become so corrupted that it sends people with little education out to teach. (To see exactly how that happens, see my blog inside-higher-ed .)

One thing the Johnson Administration did wrong was to trust people in higher education to not be “just like the rest of us” (to paraphrase Mark Twain). Thus, they didn’t do the hard work of ensuring accountability.

Jefferson wrote that, without educating the common people, power will fall into the hands of charlatans; that in a democracy, only the education of the common people can protect us. We better start working on that before it is too late.

Source: Making America Great Again Isn’t Just About Money and Power – The New York Times