This might be interesting to Catholic Light readers, especially since the previous discussion of universities veered off into a discussion about Catholic primary schools:
Jeff Jacoby, a Boston Globe columnist, reports that the Southern Baptists may consider a resolution at their convention “urging the denomination’s 16 million members to take their children out of public schools and either home school them or send them to parochial schools.”
If this becomes a trend, it’s a huge shift for Protestant churches. It used to be that “secular” schools taught an essentially Protestant worldview, complete with Bible readings in many school districts. Therefore, Protestants — including “good guys” like the Southern Baptists — have been reluctant to give up on public schools.
This is an entirely good thing. We need more fellow citizens to stand up for the principle that it is parents who raise children with the assistance of the schools, not the other way around. Evangelicals are roughly a third of the electorate, as are Catholics. If we join forces, maybe we can enact the best school reform of all, which is getting the state out of directly running schools altogether.
Author: Eric Johnson
This is the last day of “National Arson Awareness Week”!
In honor of this most solemn time of the year, please refrain from burning anything for fun, or for the insurance money. (Yes, that means you too, Guido.)
Why higher education is expensive middle-class welfare
Peter Wood, a professor at Boston University, weighs in on Senator Kerry’s proposal to make college more affordable. I’m posting this because of the comments on my post about the “giant sucking sound” coming from universities siphoning people’s money from their wallets. He confirms my thesis that higher education is expensive because of government intervention:
Why is college so expensive? Why does federal aid never really succeed in making college more affordable? These shouldn’t be deep mysteries. For over a decade I participated in university meetings aimed at determining my university’s annual tuition increases. The only real question was, “How much can we get away with?” And the only real worry was that, if we overreached, we might move to the dreaded top of the list for largest increases. Most years, it fell to me to draft a letter to parents from the Chairman of the Board explaining that the tuition increase reflected this or that combination of new construction projects and programs.
I recall visiting George Mason when Steve Schultz was going there in the early ’90s, when Virginia balanced its budget by modest reductions in spending. The university president decided that if the state was going to reduce its subsidy, he would endanger the safety of his students. He didn’t quite phrase it like that, but he did order the facilities department to start turning off random street lights for several hours a night, as a “cost-cutting” measure. He could have fired a useless administrators and that would have saved as much money, but instead he wanted to make sure young women would walk around in dark areas so they might be more easily assaulted.
Wood includes an ominous possible explanation for high prices:
But maybe we have just decided that high prices for a college education are a good way to organize our society. Those prices are high enough to discourage large families and to provide a strong incentive for both parents to work.
…which means the price of a college education is another manifestation, not of capitalism run amok, but of the Culture of Death.
Third in a line of Hollow Men
I have not read a comparison of the last three Democratic presidential candidates, not even in the narrow subject of their proposed policies. Perhaps that’s because Senator Kerry has few specific proposals, but I am not interested in that right now. What strikes me is that Clinton, Gore, and Kerry are all Hollow Men.
I use that term not to express my contempt for their politics, but as a description of their souls, at least the aspects of their souls we can see without knowing them personally. “The Hollow Men” was one of the most famous poems of the 20th century, composed by T.S. Eliot in 1925 and still frighteningly relevant today. He sings of men who are dessicated to the roots of their being, mere shadows of men.
On the surface, the three men seem very different. The Arkansas kid from a broken home, the son whose senator-father programmed him to succeed in politics, and the Swiss-boarding-school product have few superficial similarities. Yet consider these things: all of them knew at a very young age that they would run for president, and calibrated their actions accordingly. They spent nearly their entire adult lives in politics, and virtually no time in the private sector.
None of them have any discernable principles for which they have worked during their political lives, and they have introduced no significant ideas into politics. Their primary concern is promoting themselves, not for the sake of a cause, but solely for personal advancement. The three men reject traditional understandings of morality in favor of a fuzzy relativism.
Because they do not seek to destroy and murder their opponents like a Middle Eastern despot, their danger to the body politic is not immediately apparent. Whatever one might think of Jimmy Carter, for example, he was not a Hollow Man in that he truly attempted to serve others when he was in office, and though ambitious (what high officeholder isn’t?), he did not allow his ambition to enslave him.
By contrast, the Hollow Men will subordinate everything and anything to their ambitions. They fought in the Vietnam War, they protested against it; they spoke out against abortion, they promise to nominate only doctrinaire pro-abortion judges; they say they will propose a tax cut, they raise your taxes; etc.
Sane men change their opinions in the light of new facts or upon deeper reflection. The Hollow Men change their opinions based on their perception of the world’s trajectory. Every action has raw calculation behind it: will this gain me votes or will it lose me votes?
What frightens me is not simply that the Hollow Men are self-serving and venal, devoid of higher purpose. We will always have such men until Jesus comes again. What frightens me is that so many ordinary people vote for them. What frightens me more is that millions of ordinary people are exactly like them.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us — if at all — not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
[Read the whole poem]
Kerry’s comrades go public
Six weeks ago, I wrote this:
Sen. Kerry is the kind of officer that enlisted men loathe — working the system for his own benefit instead of theirs, advancing his own interests with no loyalty to those underneath him….I’d be curious to see what his former subordinates really think of him. They’re probably too classy to denounce their former commanding officer in public, but it would be great to get them into a bar and see what they say after a few drinks.
Now we know: they don’t think he should be the commander-in-chief.
UPDATE: Read this essay for a first-hand look at why Kerry doesn’t measure up.