The School Industrial Complex & its Role in National DIVORCE

The second half of Angelo Codevilla's article "American Exodus" discusses the Educational Establishment.

Midway through, he mentions how the elite schools have a reputation of creating intellectually adept citizens worthy of being at the top of the pyramid.  But what happens when that reputation is ruined?  What then? And how long can that reputation last in today's WOKE stupidity?

"Until recently, graduation from highly selective colleges seemed to certify their graduates as better for having been admitted, and doubly so for having learned more than students at lesser schools. But for a generation, the Ivy League, Stanford, and others have made a point of admitting many students with lower scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test rather than students with higher ones. In general, and with the exception of physics, chemistry, and pure math, the more highly rated the college, the less work it expects from its students. And since learning is inherently proportionate to studying, graduates of these academic peaks often know less than kids out of Podunk State. Yet they give their students something of supposedly greater practical value than knowledge: prestige, pretentiousness, and access to enviable careers.

Which leads one to ask why the nation’s most powerful consulting groups, private equity firms, and big banks hire Ivy League types and pay them so much. They are not necessarily all that bright or knowledgeable. Why then are they so valuable? Not because of what they know, but who they are: junior members of the oligarchy, identically chosen, trained, and confirmed to defend its interests, to communicate its priorities, and preserve its hierarchy. How come the public-private oligarchy was able to use the COVID challenge to crush independent business, thus transferring massive wealth to itself? Because its various parts are staffed by interconnected people who, whatever their differences, instinctively trump the Smiths’ priorities with those of their own class.

Of all the oligarchy’s parts, the educational establishment’s power most depends on prestige. But under the academic regalia, it has no more clothes than the proverbial emperor. The humble Smiths can cut the problem off at the roots simply by ceasing to credit the sources of prestige. The moment that the Smiths cease to think of Harvard and Stanford products as “smart,” and instead think “pretentious,” they deprive the oligarchy of much of its legitimacy. The moment that they realize that most colleges sell expensive four-year vacations from responsibility, they can stop supporting them, and ask instead where and at what price they may best obtain the combination of knowledge and credentials they seek. The Smiths can also urge those choices on whomever they elect at all levels of government."

Where Codevilla writes "Smiths", think 'regular people'.

Here is why I tell students that the so called 'prestigious' schools aren't worth it when it comes to getting a quality education.  Remember this story from 2017?  I do.  It's the first thing I thought of when I read the second half of "American Exodus":

This young man, addled by the warm feelings of bonhomie by being an 'activist', got into many prestigious schools.  He went to Yale.  

He did extremely well on the racist standardized exams, noted in the wildly positive and unquestioning article from NBC news.

This is what the Ivy League schools and Stanford accept for a college essay?  Repeating a slogan 100 times?  If you or your child did that ... would he get in to the school?  Would you allow that for an essay?

This guy is being trained to rule over you.  He fits in perfectly with the Absurdist Woke Country we have become.  It goes without saying that millions of people, many of them in the Black neighborhood where I work, aren't down with having this person tell us how to live our lives, and if we disobey we get 'canceled'.  I don't think so, and it's one of the ingredients in the current, slowly cooking National Divorce.

Codevilla sums it up here, correctly:

"That is why going one’s own way, while paying no more attention to the woke than is absolutely necessary, should be the agenda of the country party, which in this case includes all of those who still feel an attachment to the ideals of republican citizenship that we once shared in common as Americans."

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