Clashing bad ideas on college fill my social media provoked by Scott Walker. Like Washington, Lincoln, and Truman, but also like several neighborhood bums now watching Netflix everyday in their parent’s dens, Scott Walker did not finish college.
Defenders of Walker are right to say that college is not for everyone and that a great many successful people do not finish (Walt Disney!). I would go further. Given the education he was getting or was willing to get, dropping out of college may allow him to become President of the United States. A certain kind of college education, the McCollege centered in credentialing workers for the welfare state, impede critical thinking, innovation, and leadership. They also waste valuable formative years and saddle a student with debt.
As George Washington saw all his life, however, a good college education is very valuable. He did not have it, wished he had, not because he could have done more (surely impossible!), but he could have enjoyed it more. The kind of education John Adams had gave Adams (an inferior man) certain abilities and training that would have helped Washington. College is not a necessity for most Defenders of Walker who attack college for many are going too far. If college is for you, then you’d better go, because (generally) college will help you earn more money and can teach you virtue.
Here is some advice to the young Scott Walker after which I will have a sage word for Howard Dean:
Don’t go to college just to get a credential. Do go to college to become skilled and virtuous.
A “mere” diploma is good, but a focussed one is better. American higher education is called to two tasks: educating for the first job and creating a fit leadership class for the Republic. Find a school that is faculty centered with a premium on mentoring you. Don’t ask if you will get an advisor, of course you will. Ask if you can meet with your advisor weekly and then do it.
Make sure you want to grow up with values like the leaders of the school.
Don’t go to college to make friends and hang out. Do go to college to get educated, know what that means, and you will also make friends and hang out.
A better idea than paying someone for a second-rate hangout would be to get a job, buy a pass to a resort, make friends at work and church, and get paid while becoming holier.
An education will be hard if it is real. If you are not stretched, challenged, worked hard to the point that schoolwork is equivalent to a full-time job, then you are at hopped up high school or the wrong school for your genius.
Walker sounds like he was going through the motions, then got a challenging, meaningful job, got married and grew up. Good for him.
Don’t go to college to kill time. Do go to college to work.
In fact, do not do anything to kill time. If you do not know what to do, go volunteer at a local charity and work a part-time job. Serve others until you know your calling. Read his biography. Walker was drifting through college (like many students who graduate with high grades nowadays!), dropped out to work, and never looked back.
Get mentored, don’t get credits. Do find an Obi-wan.
Walker had no mentors, he had “teachers.” Read their smarmy memories of him. Did prof have him over to his or her house? Really listen to him? I bet they did not and if asked why not would say: our institution gave us too much to do. That is probably true. Do not go to that kind of institution.
Young Scott needs an Obi-wan. Find him in college or at work, just find him.
Don’t borrow more than you would for a starter car and then don’t buy a new car until you pay off your college loan. Do make a financial plan.
If you have to run up more debt than that to go to school, get a job. Work hard. Save. Go to school when you can afford it. Like Scott Walker, you might disagree and never get around to it on your way to a wonderful life. Like many other people discover, you will enjoy it more when you go back to school.
Walker saved money by dropping out. Generally, he would have been better served to have (eventually) done some degree completion program. Employers like this paper. A good degree completion program can introduce you to the great stuff we were all too young to appreciate the first time around. But of course, Walker’s example may mean that a significant number of people don’t need that.
Think about it. Work while thinking by itself is unusual enough that it may make you governor.
As for Howard Dean’s concern for Walker’s educational soul, I can only wish that Dean’s medical training had given him more human and logical training. He worries that Scott Walker may not be educated sufficiently due to a lack of a college degree, but never defines his terms. What does Dean mean by education? Does he mean Walker might lack skill in Socratic dialectic? If so, most graduates of state schools do as well. Is this a necessary quality for a successful presidency?
It cannot be job training. Walker plainly has executive skills even if you do not agree with how he uses them. He has political skills. It appears that finishing the last year and one-half at his old school is unlikely to have made him better as a governor.
It seems unlikely to be anything very substantial since in some accounts I have seen he is about two-thirds of the way to graduation. College graduates: remember your senior year. Was that the moment you “got it?” Or did you coast a bit getting ready for the work world? My students should not have wasted senior year for many it was a capstone where they pulled it all together, but I see no evidence that Walker was being given anything to pull together.
His education looks like the typical “cafeteria” plan of jumping through the right unit hoops in the hope that the hoops in aggregate will form a pattern in the collegiate mind. I have never seen this work, but maybe it would have in Walker’s case.
Here is a hypothetical for Dean. Imagine an electrician. He is very successful, runs his own business, reads and discusses politics. His local party gets him elected mayor. He runs for governor and wins. He wins again in a state where his party has trouble winning. He did not go to college.
Is this hypothetical man suspect to you, Howard Dean? If so, then I suspect that Dean has a magical view of college. It takes the educational impure and washes them in the water of wisdom and makes them wise. If only it was not so ludicrous given our experience, those of us in education would be tempted by Dean’s delusion.
In fact, it seems more likely that Dean is merely a snob and one stupid enough to make Walker look like a regular guy to the two-thirds of Americans who did not graduate college.
Woodrow Wilson was a very highly credentialed man. He ran a fine university: he was also a racist, insufferable, wrong-headed boor that took us to war and then frittered away the peace. I would rather be governed by the average American than Wilson because the average American would be more likely to be humble and not confuse the voice of Wilson with the voice of God.
I have no doubt that Wilson was more credentialed than Harry Truman, but give me Harry Truman every time: he won a war, the peace, and learned and grew in office.
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