Title: "Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech
Most Congress critters are lawyers
of the "slip and fall" variety, it seems. We could do like Dick
Cheney and have "Lawyer Season."
:-)
David
"Free
speech is meant to
protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition,
needs no
protection."—Neal
Boortz
On 4/23/2012 7:10 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
Hi Billy,
Fascinating article.
I found this bit confusing, though:
My friends who work in sociology
always warn me about confusing cause and correlation.
Yet I think most people would agree, regardless of
where they are on the political spectrum, that the
public discourse in this country has been declining
rather than improving in recent years. I would suggest
that there might be some correlation between that
decline and the degree to which our commitment is
weakening to the kind of education I’m talking about.
I tend to trust the public more than politicians, but
too many politicians try to get the conversation down
to the lowest possible denominator and reduce the
conversation to slogans and sneers. If you have an
educated citizenry, they will recognize that. That’s
the bedrock tenet of our democracy. We cannot have a
thriving democracy without an educated citizenry. If
college works as it should, you will have more
citizens who can tell the difference between panderers
trying to sell you a bill of goods and someone who is
making a reasoned argument and respecting you as a
thinking human being. If we don’t have a citizenry
like that, we can just close up our democracy. That’s
perhaps the biggest reason we should all be concerned
about the future of college as an institution.
The irony is that I'm pretty sure we have more college
educated people than ever before -- and certainly pretty much
everyone in Congress has a college degree -- but that doesn't
seem to be improving the public discourse. I somehow doubt
that selecting only graduates of liberal arts colleges would
make things better, but I'd be interested in seeing some data.
The only conclusion I can make from his argument is that
either:
a) colleges aren't doing the job they should do
b) it encourages exerts like him to make sweeping
statements without the data to back it up
c) by "more educated" he means "more liberal", so that
people will agree with his side of the discourse
Either way, it makes me *more* interested in destroying the
presumed credibility college holds in our culture -- if only
to force schools like the ones he lionizes to actually deliver
what they promise. The real danger to college isn't their
future, but their present.
-- Ernie P.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
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Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
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