Reflecting
There’s this really famous scene from the first season of The West Wing where, after an episode of built-up debate surrounding funding for public education, Rob Lowe makes this speech about how, “Education is the silver bullet.” It’s been on my mind today.
This liberal-minded idea that if we were all just smarter everything would be magically fixed about society is pretty insane. Every election it’s a manufactured debate—how did the college-educated vote against the non-college-educated? It becomes a whole discourse, another thing that keeps us divided.
But those Cornell rapists? Well, they’re going to Cornell. Aren’t they educated? George W Bush, Dick Cheney, the Clintons, and JD Vance all went to Yale. Benjamin Netanyahu graduated from MIT while taking classes at Harvard. Richard Nixon went to Duke. I’m pretty sure it’s a requirement to go to Oxford to be Prime Minister in England. Half of the psychopath tech guys in Silicon Valley attended Stanford.
I do believe that all education should be free and excellent, but these ideas that cross into areas of discrimination and bias about intellect and aptitude and leadership can really irk me. The people who have done the most harm to the world are the ones who come from the best schools. An education happens in many ways outside of reading pages from a book and it doesn’t take much time to see in the news what these men are really learning in American schools.
