I was the first person in my family to graduate college. In high school, I was teased as a nerd. At Georgetown, I was teased as an "elitist." (Of course, by going to work for Senator Ted Kennedy as an intern the day before my first class, I stood out from my peers, many of them privileged fresh-babies from well-to-do families).
Under Herr Trump -- the no longer "Teflon Don," -- there's just a Cabinet full of mendacious mediocre putrid Philistine millionaires and billionaires.
Provocative article from The New York Times:
A framed eighth-grade diploma, dated June 19, 1913, hangs on the wall opposite my computer. It belonged to my grandmother, Minnie Rothenhoefer, one of eight children in a German immigrant family, who was forced to quit school at age 14 after her alcoholic father abandoned his family. Her first job was picking onions and her greatest regret — she lived to age 99 — was that she never attended high school. “But there’s no excuse for ignorance when you can go right down to the public library,” she often said.
Gran has been in my thoughts even more than usual this year, because I know that she would have scoffed at one of the unanticipated consequences of the Trump presidency. I am referring to the endless self-flagellation among well-educated liberals — “the elites,” in pejorative parlance — about their failure to “get” the concerns of white working-class voters. Gran never expected anyone to “get” her. She was determined to educate herself for what she considered the privilege of citizenship.
Our current political discourse is corrupted by two equally flawed narratives about the relationship between social class and politics. The first is a fable accepted by many intellectuals, who have found themselves guilty because just enough white working-class voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin handed Mr. Trump his Electoral College win in 2016. Many fear that this year’s midterm elections will once again result in a rejection of “elitism” by the same voters.
In a second, equally flawed narrative — adopted by a segment of both blue-collar workers and intellectuals — the American working class is so victimized that almost none of its members are capable of accepting the responsibility of civic self-education.
These narratives sometimes collide within families. On a trip to Detroit last spring, I met a professor of political science who seemed to believe that “elitist” obtuseness had lost Michigan for the Democrats. He told me that he felt responsible because his aunt and uncle — postal workers in suburban Macomb County — had voted Republican for the first time in their lives, mainly because they believed Mr. Trump’s false campaign assertion about New Jersey Muslims cheering the Sept. 11 attacks. He had been unable to convince them otherwise.
Why should he feel guilty, I asked, if his relatives had chosen to ignore extensive evidence that the cheering never occurred? “I guess because I feel I ought to speak their language and I don’t,” he replied.
I have frequently heard the phrase about not speaking “their” language from academics, journalists and political strategists. Here is a fact, not an alternative fact: Blue-collar workers speak English.
Too many intellectuals have internalized a stereotype, emanating from both the far left and the far right, of fuzzy-headed elitism — as if willed ignorance and intellectual laziness did not cut across social classes. And some in the working class are just as animated by a stereotype of “elites” as people who look down on everyone without a doctorate. Self-denigration among the best educated is particularly harmful because it reinforces this belief.
The day after the 2016 election, Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, wrote in Harvard Business Review that one of many things the “elites” don’t understand about the working class is that the latter “resents professionals but admires the rich.”
The author meant to criticize “elitists,” but her generalization presents a distorted view of the working class. Some working-class Americans resent some professionals — say, lawyers for slumlords or doctors who won’t treat Medicaid and Medicare patients. But there are surely just as many with an outsize respect for professionals — especially if the professional happens to be their own doctor or their child’s favorite teacher.
The energy expended by many “elitists” on constructing tortuous apologies for their advantages would be better invested in sharing the fruits of those advantages.
While some studies have indicated that people cling even more strongly to their deepest beliefs when challenged by contradictory evidence, it is also true that human beings frequently do change their minds — about everything from sexual behavior to marijuana to gun laws — if they are treated respectfully by those presenting the evidence.
One of the greatest compliments I have ever received came from a Latino student at Youngstown State University, in an Ohio city often cited as an example of Rust Belt decay. This American-born son of immigrants was working three jobs to pay his tuition. He said that he had taken my remarks about the importance of liberal arts seriously, even though he had previously considered such knowledge irrelevant to his goal of becoming a math teacher.
When I asked why my comments had persuaded him to reconsider, he replied that he was pleased when I began my talk with the words “ladies and gentlemen.” He added, “When I’m teaching, I’m going to open all of my classes with ‘ladies and gentlemen.’ It’ll tell the kids what’s expected of them.”
There is an aspirational hunger in many young people that highly educated Americans can help satisfy — but only by being themselves instead of pretending to be “ordinary folks.”
The American dream has never been about denigrating education but about seeing that the next generation has greater access to learning. Who is in a better position to help Americans who want that chance than those who already benefited from the generous side of the dream? The “elites” should take practical steps to persuade others not by hectoring them but by working to better the quality of life for all.
First, intellectuals must speak up, not down, to everyone. Americans remember public addresses like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech precisely because he spoke in elevated English. You won’t find him referring to “folks” anywhere in that speech.
Second, educators must help turn students into educated voters. Too many schools fail to provide students with tools of logic that would enable them to assess the quality of information they absorb from every screen. All schools, for example, should have a curriculum that teaches children how to evaluate online information. Most recently, we have seen the results of this type of education in the forceful, logical responses of student survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.
Finally, those who have profited from the best schooling our society has to offer must fight to make college more affordable for others. The working-class students I have met — unlike Republicans in a much-cited 2017 Pew poll — know that college has a positive, not a negative, effect on their future. They base their actions on reality rather than ideology, and the reality is that the pay gap between the college-educated and all other Americans is at a historic high.
As I write, I am looking at my grandmother’s diploma. She left it to me in her will as evidence of a life in which I never saw her alone without a book or newspaper in hand. That is positive elitism — embodying the pursuit of excellence rather than money or credentials — for which no one need apologize and to which anyone can aspire.
1 comment:
Another divisive churning rubbish article from the new york slimes based on faulty premise narratives. The college educated administrative class in Scamerica is the most strongly self mesmerized class in the nation and as a result the most easily duped;
Excerpt;
In the American Crumbunist pyramid social structure (it is a caste system that rivals that of India) there is an administrative buffer layer just beneath the layer of super rich psychopaths at the top. That layer which is comprised of predominantly college indoctrinated 'professionals'; bankers, lawyers, government regulators, school superintendents, politicians, economists, business consultants, journalists, police chiefs, military brass, etc., is called the Green Wall Of $ilence. Members of the Green Wall Of $ilence caste all receive a far greater crumb supply than the rest of us and for that extra remuneration it is their job to keep the system running smoothly, validated, and legitimized. Their own college indoctrinations (that come with a high dollar entry fee coupled with a strong predisposition to system accepting submissive docility and extreme wealth and status adoration) include a very generous infusion of ego elitism reinforced with a steady stream of very special and clubby academic honors, awards, prizes, degrees, certifications, unique identity logos, diplomas, and licenses (all of which are an extension of that first ego shaping and forming star awarded in kindergarten), and all of which create exclusive rights, status, and elite privileges to operate in specific highly controlled markets; law, education, economics, medicine, etc.
These awards, honors, degrees, certifications, logos, diplomas, and licenses, are the glue that binds the status conscious Green Wall Of $ilence so tightly together. They have also always been the underpinning of the incestuous revolving door networking relationships of corporatism and government, and as such they have played a big part in the shift from Vanilla Greed For Profit Evilism to Pernicious Greed For Destruction Xtrevilism that has taken place in the past fifty plus years. It is the Green Wall Of $ilence, which is in great part a con against the public in and of itself in the first place, that provides the fertile ground of gullibility for accepting and furthering the spread of the Xtrevilist psychopathy. The more one preselects themselves, aspires to, and pays for, these contrived award, status, and licensing systems, and the more one becomes invested in them and makes them an integral part of their ego, the more gullible and forgiving one is of being subverted in their own core moral beliefs, and beliefs in the 'system', in order to retain them.
It should also be noted that the Green Wall Of $ilence has an inherent stronger tolerance of the transgressions of the Blue Wall Of Silence (the thin blue line) as it is they that enforce the laws that give them, and insure them, their power. This represents a base line collusion with law enforcement."
More here...
http://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/
Keep on pretending
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