Does College Make You More or Less Interesting? I Say Less

Much of college education is a complete scam. A joke. A terrible fraud and an immense money-laundering operation that guilts parents and taxpayers into distributing vast amounts of wealth to a bunch of entitled elitists. They have your number. You have been snookered because the "educrat" mafia has convinced you, as a parent and taxpayer, that your child will be a failure unless he or she goes to college, the type of college that only they administer and control. The frumpy professional classes who live off the largess of the state, but have never run a business or have any idea how to do so, are convinced that society will implode without $85,000-a-year tuition. "We must support higher education!" But what they really mean is we must continue to take money from all other elements of society and lavish it on ourselves by selling a selfish, monotone and faulty product.

How do I know all this? One, I have eyes. Two, have you seen the finished product? Three, I read.

There are reports galore that at every Ivy League school, students can't absorb books. They complain vociferously if they have to read more than a handful of pages. They don't have the attention span. They fatigue after a few pages. Many say they never had to read an entire book in high school. They've been taught simple platitudes about every subject, giving them monolithic views to spout back on tests, but not the critical thinking skills and nuance that come only from reading great books.

Have you—especially you folks who own your own business and are used to getting things done—ever had conversations with the professors who teach your college-age children? It's not terribly hard to get a Ph.D., or whatever qualifies one to stand up at a lectern and talk to half-drunken, bloodshot-eyed college students. My experience, on several occasions when visiting an old law school don or having a discussion with a college professor, is this: this guy doesn't know jacksh#t about his own specialty! It might be because this fella got his Ph.D. 20 years ago and has been sitting on his fat ass, smoking clove cigarettes ever since. It might be because the Ph.D. had no value. Or it might simply be that the guy just ain't real bright. Society tells us all that we must kiss the ring of academia to obtain knowledge and, subsequently, success in life, no matter what it costs. A giant guilt trip manufactured by those that are enriched.

All of this is right in front of our eyes, but in true societal cognitive dissonance, we ignore black-and-white facts, not wanting to stray from our usual social convention. Like sheep, we do what is expected of us!

Back to books. There's no substitute for gaining knowledge, understanding humanity's many struggles, and sharpening cognitive skills by reading great books. To understand why our world and our fellow man are the way they are, the answer lies in reading the classics. The great thinkers of the past did not sit in classrooms eight hours a day, shooting spitballs at one another and telling Mrs. Landers that their dog ate their homework. They read books and discussed them with smart people. How do I know this? I read books.

A recent example. Last week I read Dostoevsky's Netochka Nezvanova, a work he never finished. By the time Netochka was sixteen, she had read Ivanhoe at least three times. Throughout Russian literature, we find a remarkably literate society at a very young age. They read books! For those of you who argue that this literacy existed only among the nobility (not true), I'll remind you that the poorest of the poor in America today have greater access to books and learning materials than did all the czars.

Speaking of Ivanhoe, what do we learn? What do we get out of it? Each reader has different perspectives. The book evokes a myriad of nuanced thoughts and tidbits of learning that are solely individual. Contrast this with any classroom on twelfth-century England, where students are expected to spit back collective learning—what they are told to believe—to pass the test. In Ivanhoe, my senses are struck by humanity's timeless need for the romantic. Did Anglo-Saxon slaves really wear silver collars around their necks to denote their bondage? Prince John's lust for power is age-old, as is his circle of sycophants, a reality ever present throughout history. As one of both Anglo-Saxon and Norman descent, where would my allegiances have been? Isaac the Jew, the diaspora, and how resilient the Jews have always been in the face of hardship. How lusting after a woman can make a man crazy. I could go on....

Being spoon-fed material to spit back on tests does not heighten the senses and ignores context, modulation, subtleties, and a million influencing factors that are deeply individual in nature.

In Middlemarch, we read about Dr. Tertius Lydgate, who would not prescribe medicines because he felt they often did more harm than good and were primarily prescribed so the medical industry could make money. Sound familiar?  His wife was a hot babe, but she spent him into the poorhouse. Yet, knowing myself, I would have chosen her too over the much more virtuous, and equally beautiful, Dorothea. In Wuthering Heights, we meet the dark-spirited Heathcliff, the ultimate control freak. Jane Austen introduces us to the "good guy," Mr. Darcy. There really are people like that. There are also social-climbing gossipers like Mrs. Bennet, and my gosh, Thackeray's Vanity Fair makes the superficialities of Hollywood look like a seventeenth-century Puritan village. But we know from The Scarlet Letter that even Puritan villages had self-righteous hypocrites. Not only do we learn lesson after lesson about our never-ending human nature, we learn about the environments that shaped human thought and customs, and through these lenses we understand ourselves and our world. We also become much more sensitive, and less judgmental, as to why the world is as it is.

From reading, we formulate our own narratives (not those of the collective), and we discuss our thoughts and impressions with others. That's the primary way knowledge was disseminated among the greatest thinkers in world history. One of my ancestors, the Rev. James Waddel, taught James Madison his Greek and Latin. No phones, no cars, no trains, no libraries, no electricity, no paved roads, a sparse and rural landscape—yet these men were very learned, and frankly much more so than today's political leaders, who have one hundred times the advantages. Why? They didn't farm out their responsibilities to an "expert class" to do what they could do themselves by reading great works and talking to smart people.

So who is brave enough to tell their 16-year-old son to forego "college," get a job  and commit to reading great works of literature and history? My guess is that in four years that boy will be far more interesting and worthwhile to society than 90% of his college-educated peers.