What Are Your Thoughts on Student Loan Forgiveness?

[pbrower2a]

College education used to be inexpensive. It was not an extreme hardship except to the destitute, for whom everything is fiendishly difficult. Know well that most of the colleges were liberal arts schools, and that college instructors were generally not PhD's. The liberal arts schools typically had rigid curricula, which made the results predictable enough that anyone who graduated from them could be expected to know a few predictable things. Knowing the subtleties of great literature has little direct influence on how one records debits and credits on a ledger or sells widgets on the road, but on the other hand the graduate of a liberal arts program knew that there was more to life than pop culture and boozing-and-whoring. There were technical schools for those who had the passion for engineering or accounting.

Today we could probably revive such education as the norm for anyone smart enough to get anything out of such schooling, which means that one could get a solid, humanistic education if one has adequate grades and school-board scores. (the College Board scores largely weed out the scatterbrains and dimwits who were going to flunk out anyway -- or those interested only in "sex&drugs&rock-n-roll".

College wasn't fiendishly expensive. Herbert Hoover, a poor boy, got through Stanford University doing college chores.  

The liberal arts school established a culture of norms for the middle and upper-middle classes; we could all recognize its value today. With the Multiversity that came into being in the 1960's one could get a four-year degree and anyone looking at the sheepskin might not know what walked through the door. Today we need among those who are to have any responsibilities over others or for others to recognize the validity of the great body of wisdom and apply that. The laws of formal logic are just the same as the ones in Socrates' world, thank you. Recognizing the distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture and the difference in what they offer people is a good idea. Knowing some economics (there is no such thing as a free lunch), psychology (how the mind works -- or doesn't), statistics and probability (many people who thought that Trump actually won the 2020 election did not realize that his modest leads in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were going to disappear as late votes not then counted were largely from Atlanta,  Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee obviously knew little about statistics and probability and instead saw vote fraud), philosophy (finding meaning in life), and some other material not part of the high-school curriculum.

Let's put it this way: if you have this and know what it is



you have little excuse for being bored.  

The trick is to know how magnificent this music is. Everyone responds to it a bit differently, but it is well worth the time.  

Let's connect this to some of our concerns. Global warming implies heavy consumption leading to waste heat that warms the atmosphere and allows more humidity to entrench itself in the air and prevent much night-time cooling. Having experience-based lives instead of material-based lives will be genuine progress. 

Another is the seduction of the angry demagogue who tells people that they are better than those unlike them because... well, in America because you are white and Christian. When times get rough, or the politicians fail to solve all problems, then out comes a demagogue like Trump or Bolsonaro. It would be best if we could see through the type, but populists of their type appeal to people not quite poor except in wisdom.  If enough people fall for such a demagogue, things get nasty.