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This thread shows how deep performative meanness runs among "pragmatic" liberals. Nathan Robinson runs a pretty good magazine. That *is* a "fucking job." https://twitter.com/jhweissmann/status/1341978290018545665
I just can’t get over the fractal wrongness of this whole thing. It bundles in very political principles: Education is *for* the marketplace. All schools are vo-tech schools. Learning for learning's sake is a privilege of the wealthy. And young people mustn’t change their minds. https://twitter.com/jhweissmann/status/1341978290018545665
When we sent people to college on the GI Bill in the late 1940s, some veterans studied business and engineering. Others became great poets, novelists and scholars. Functionally, we treated college as an end, not a means. And the country grew very, very rich!
College was kept cheap through government funding and grants. Students could take flyers. Stupendous economic growth happened even though "dentists and lawyers" didn’t have to pay off huge loans. And that was with one hand tied behind our back by racism and sexism.
Segregationists connived to deny the benefits of the GI Bill to black veterans. Very few women of any race qualified. We denied ourselves the education of over half the country's brains. https://www.history.com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-benefits
At the very least white women and BIPOC who could gain admittance to universities and grad programs from the ‘40s to the ‘70s could take advantage of the low tuition. And the postwar years saw not only economic growth, but a renaissance of high, middlebrow & pop culture.
Imagine what we could have done, *and could still do*, if we treated education as a birthright for everyone, of any race and gender. Not as a source of "skills" for employers, but as a place to discover understanding and enthusiasm.
"Liberals" who insist graduates "get a job" — meaning, a corporate job adequate to retire today's loan balances — are reinforcing the same reactionary rhetoric the Right uses to disparage liberal-arts education entire. https://www.christianpost.com/news/analysis-why-are-republicans-and-obama-attacking-the-liberal-arts-part-1.html
Nobody who plays reactionary games is an ally of the marginalized, even if they dress their arguments in anti-privilege costume. They ensure Democrats under-serve our constituents, and reinforce non-voters belief that "nothing changes no matter who wins." Because it doesn’t.
You hear this a lot, but the record of online learning is *at best* mixed. Credentialism is a thing, but self-study can’t reliably replace the guidance of teachers in a fellowship of students. https://twitter.com/wiscodude/status/1342520166748401665
JERRY: Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.
— Edward Albee, The Zoo Story. https://twitter.com/chiliandgarlic/status/1342547171674103809
— Edward Albee, The Zoo Story. https://twitter.com/chiliandgarlic/status/1342547171674103809
At this point I should mention I not only really have a SoundCloud, I also make music videos. You might start here:
This is interesting but has problems: 1) It doesn’t tell us what percentage of workforce-to-military vets availed themselves of *college* benefits; 2) Got higher-paying working-class jobs is still a good thing; 3) Yes, even good policies have flaws. Let’s ameliorate them. https://twitter.com/pashulman/status/1342551335800086530
If this sounds like pie-in-the-sky hippie-dippie talk, recall that *training* was once an expected expense for businesses. https://twitter.com/bbutmydiscourse/status/1342557241766006784
I agree with Peter, we should absolutely interrogate the inequities of "golden-age of American social democracy" policies *to make more just policies now*. Not to deploy past injustices as an excuse for sticking with our also unjust status quo https://twitter.com/pashulman/status/1342559453414125572
