Should Santorum Have Called Obama a Snob?

Hmm...Pennsylvania coal miner's grandson sees preppy-yuppie-lawyer-politician as a snob. Is this news? Do we just deduct a half-point from Rick Santorum's score for being predictable, and move on? No, because the context of the name-calling is provocative.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/santorum-probably-not-the-smartest-thing-to-call-obama-a-snob/

The context was that President Obama said he wanted every U.S. citizen to go to college. Is that snobbery? Is the President not trying to share the benefits of his preppy background with everybody? I think the hearts of people who say "Every child ought to go to college" are in the right place...but if their brains were also in gear, these people would realize that what they're really saying is not "More people should enjoy the benefits I've enjoyed" but "Nobody should enjoy the benefits I've enjoyed. The benefits I've enjoyed should cease to exist."

This argument can be, should be, and has been documented, but because this is a quick reaction to someone else's blog post I'm writing it based on common knowledge. The best place to find the most documentation of these historical trends would be, I think, the later works of John Holt. I don't think anyone's worked them up into a book just on this topic. If any conservative or libertarian publishers out there want to buy the book, I'll write it.

Consider the history of the American educational system: Once upon a time, we agreed that people could and should receive a good general education, sufficient to qualify for specialized training and studies, in eight years. McGuffey's Eighth Reader steered kids as young as twelve or thirteen toward books that are now considered a challenge for college or even graduate students. High school was expensive, specialized, available only to a few rich boys who were training to become ministers or military officers. High school was sought after as a way to cushion teenagers' entry into the adult world, but few parents could afford to think about it. Most teenagers went to work.

Then people realized that the benefits of education might outweigh the benefits of early marriage, employment, and parenthood. Parents demanded high school education for girls too. Educators conceded that high school programs could be operated in residential neighborhoods on a daytime schedule, like elementary school. Teenagers could still have part-time jobs or take trade school classes while going to high school. In the 1930s, teens like the protagonist of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn could postpone high school out of generosity; teens like my mother could, if their parents were well off and they were outstanding students, give their parents bragging material by finishing high school and trade school, concurrently, with top marks in both...and have their own business ready to launch at eighteen.

Then, in the booming postwar economy, an outcry arose. "Why shouldn't every child enjoy the benefits of a high school diploma?" Children were subjected to compulsory school attendance for at least nine or ten years, and high school tuition was now funded by taxes, so most kids stayed in high school...at least until they got into college. Pressure was applied to colleges to use high school diplomas rather than tests as criteria for admission. I wasn't admitted to the colleges of my first, second, or third choice because I earned respectable marks on a G.E.D. test while still in grade eleven, and have no S.A.T. scores. Never mind that I had the top A.C.T. scores in my freshman class. Colleges weren't supposed to be competing against high schools for federal tuition funds! Employers, too, cooperated in the scheme to keep teenagers in high school by denying them even minimum-wage jobs. Eighteen-year-olds got the vote, but not all of them appreciated the trade-off of actually becoming, in terms of non-military employment opportunities, the functional equivalent of children.

But what had to be done in order to "sell" high school to the masses? High school requirements were softened. Material that had formerly been covered in grade eight, like U.S. Government, the Bible, Plato, Shakespeare's tragedies, and algebra and geometry, were reserved for high school. When I reminisce about eighth grade algebra, most Americans think, "But nobody does algebra in eighth grade--schools don't offer it--didn't Piaget prove that thirteen-year-olds can't do algebra?" Piaget was fallible; in Gate City those of us considered to be college material took algebra in grade eight. We had chances to review it in grades nine and, if necessary, grade ten. I was required to take algebra again in college, and we didn't get beyond where I'd left off in grade nine. But most Americans formed this strange belief that people need to be all the way through puberty in order to learn algebra...because otherwise, in the 1940s, a critical mass of parents would have said "All they do in high school is arts, foreign languages, and socializing. You don't need that! Go to work!"

And, when virtually everybody had a high school diploma, a high school diploma ceased to guarantee a good job. In order to have an edge over the other--well, secretaries, cashiers, even candidates for trade school--young people needed to go to college. Bill Clinton's mentor, Senator Claiborne Pell, created the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant program, now known as the Pell Grant. By the late 1970s, the masses of people born during the actual baby boom were through school, the number of young people in the rest of the baby-boom generation represented a decline, and colleges were begging everyone who'd slogged through high school to get a Pell Grant and get at least a two-year degree at no direct cost to the student or parents.

And, funnily enough...a lot of us in that age group noticed that those precious college courses everybody now needed and deserved to take were just like what we'd been doing in high school! I read one short story, "The Lady or the Tiger?", in five different literature books in five consecutive years...and, just in case anybody missed it, it was in the college literature book too, although at least the freshman literature class didn't discuss it. Calculating ratios? Calculating the volume of a solid form based on its shape? The fifty most common irregular verb forms in Spanish? The twenty-page term paper, with footnotes? Here we'd thought that was high school material, and here we were, doing it all over again, in college! Some new material appeared in different textbooks, between high school and college, but we now learned that in order to stop reviewing and start learning something new and useful that everyone on the street hadn't learned, we needed to go to university!

Look at the job situation we have today. In the small towns, a four-year college degree may still give young people some edge. With a degree in engineering, a fellow I used to date was able, after trying for two or three years, to get a full-time job as a factory laborer. In Washington the waiters and taxi drivers have four-year degrees, so if you're waiting for older people to hand you a steady "career job" that will become your adult "career," a four-year degree is already useless. And if the benefits of a college degree become as nearly universal, nationwide, as they are in Washington, they will become as useless, nationwide, as they are in Washington.

I don't think President Obama really wants his daughters to have to earn B.S. degrees before they learn to calculate the volume of a cylinder, but I think that could easily be the effect of what he says he does want. If we want the American educational system to do more than merely baby-sit children, then instead of trying to offer more years in classrooms to more young people, we need to be demanding more solid content in each classroom course.

How could that be done? By reducing the time teachers are allowed to spend reviewing last year's material. (Ask Jada Williams.) By acknowledging that some students have in fact learned what they were taught last year, and need to move directly into this year's curriculum, while other students have not learned what they were taught last year, and need to repeat last year's curriculum until they have--and students in those categories do not need to be in the same class.

The question is, in practical terms, whether we want young people to be prepared for a decent job by age eighteen, or whether we want to offer more decent jobs to more older people by subsidizing more tax-funded classes (regardless of the usefulness of those classes). It's a reasonable question. For people of the President's age, it becomes a question of whether we think it's more important for our friends to have some chance to retire, or whether we want the next generation to be able to take care of us when we retire.

I only wish Santorum had called Obama on the real question, rather than reacting with a mere distraction like "snob."