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Liberal Education Factories
00:02:13
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| Do you know, I am meeting more and more exceptional young people who have not gone to college. | |
| Are you experiencing that? | |
| I am, absolutely. | |
| I think that college has changed what it used to be, that a person would get a degree in the liberal arts and they were learning the art of freedom. | |
| They were learning the sort of essential canon of Western culture. | |
| And now that's not the case. | |
| A liberal education is anything but liberal. | |
| You know, I've come to see college, and I mentioned this in the video, as factories. | |
| You know, there's so many of them. | |
| They're so well-funded by the government. | |
| It's a factory in every town. | |
| And like any factory, they exist to create a consistent product. | |
| And that, unfortunately, that consistency is worldview. | |
| The consistency is the way that they teach people to think or the things that they teach people to think. | |
| And as an employer, I know that... | |
| I don't want people who all think exactly the same. | |
| I don't want people who attack every problem from the exact same vantage. | |
| We were talking during the break about what makes a good talk show, and you mentioned people don't know what you're going to say next. | |
| Alan said that what makes someone a star is the element of surprise, that we want to know what they're going to think next. | |
| It's the same when you're building a business. | |
| When you first build a business, it's all your ideas. | |
| The business is really an extension. | |
| But as the company grows, your mind can't contain all of the problems. | |
| Your mind can't solve for all of the innovation that needs to take place to make you succeed. | |
| And you need people who see the world in a way that you don't see the world. | |
| And I think that quite often I find that from people who took their liberal education seriously and actually were liberally educated, many of them self-educated. | |
| Andrew Klavan, our mutual friend, is a great example of this. | |
| He says that he went to college. | |
| He got his degree. | |
| And then he realized he had no education. | |
| And so he spent the decade after that educating himself. | |
| Well, that's an actual liberal education. | |
| He attacked the text to see what the text actually had to teach. | |
| Instead of learning about the text through a certain lens from someone else. | |
| You know, I just want to tell you what this last comment made me think. | |
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Why Learn from Defective People?
00:02:16
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| There are a handful, like St. John's, I think, has two branches. | |
| One in Maryland and one in New Mexico, I believe. | |
| They just teach you for four years the great books. | |
| But I realize that the current mode of thought of the left would reject all great books because they would find their authors morally defective. | |
| How could you read? | |
| Just forgive me one moment. | |
| There was a very important article in the Jewish Journal by Antal Sharansky. | |
| The great Soviet dissident who Reagan got out of the Soviet Union. | |
| And he's a Jew who moved to Israel and he became a member of the government. | |
| He's a very major moral thinker. | |
| And he writes about, if we use the standard of were you a good or bad guy, it's all over. | |
| And he said, here, as a Jew, I would have to reject. | |
| There were so many anti-Semites in history. | |
| I'd have to reject most great literature. | |
| Shakespeare wrote Shylock about Shylock in Merchant of Venice. | |
| Dostoevsky was anti-Semitic. | |
| He said, so it's absurd. | |
| Because Dostoevsky was anti-Semitic, I have nothing to learn from Brothers Karamazov. | |
| Because Shakespeare wrote about Shylock, I have nothing to learn from Othello or Romeo and Juliet. | |
| So this guy owned slaves, this guy did this, so it's over. | |
| There are no great books. | |
| Well, if you can't learn from flawed people, there's no one left to learn from. | |
| That's a great, that is a great line. | |
| You know, I often think about David being a man after God's own heart. | |
| It's actually difficult at first glance to find very much redeeming about him. | |
| That's right. | |
| At all. | |
| Except that he defeated Goliath. | |
| Right. | |
| That's a good trick. | |
| Yeah, that was significant. | |
| Jeremy Boring gives the course for PragerU this week about sending kids to college. | |
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Why Does Government Fund Colleges?
00:02:54
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| It's a factory of indoctrination. | |
| You mentioned all the money that the government gives colleges. | |
| I know this is like an elementary question, but I'm not embarrassed to ask it. | |
| Why does the government give colleges so much money? | |
| Well, it's in their interest, too. | |
| I mean, I don't think the government would do anything that isn't in its interest. | |
| Education from the point of view of the government, as you know and talk about often, the government is largely controlled by the left. | |
| The permanent government, the elected government might change. | |
| You might have a Republican like President Trump come in, but the standing army, the bureaucrats, all lean in one direction. | |
| And it's in their interest to raise up a new generation that thinks exactly the way that they think. | |
| And what troubles me the most is that the right is so slow to catch on to this. | |
| I had the opportunity to have dinner with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and she's a wonderful woman. | |
| She spoke very eloquently about the need for charter schools. | |
| But during the Q&A after this small gathering at someone's home that I was at, so many people, all fairly like-minded people, you know, probably several of them who were there, several of the questions turned to the idea of not needing to send everyone to college. | |
| And everyone had the same line about it. | |
| It was, you know, not everyone is right for a college education. | |
| Some people need to go to trade schools. | |
| Some people, the best they could ever do is be a welder. | |
| And why should we make them think that they have to go to college and be saddled with all of this debt? | |
| We need to teach kids that it's okay to be a car mechanic, that it's okay to take out our... | |
| The way I heard it was, with respect to them, I know they're all... | |
| Good-hearted people. | |
| But all I could hear is, not everyone's as great as I am. | |
| Someone needs to take out my trash. | |
| Someone needs to help me raise my kids. | |
| Someone needs to know how to weld things when I break them. | |
| And I raised my hand and said to the secretary, I said, I think that we're actually approaching this question the wrong way. | |
| Yes, it's certainly true that some people will be great welders, and that's the path that they'll take in life, and we should give them those opportunities as a society. | |
| But many of the millionaires and billionaires that I know also didn't get a college education. | |
| We are mutually associated with a billionaire family out of Texas who I don't know his exact history, but I'm not even sure he has a high school education. | |
| Certainly not a college degree. | |
| And then Mark Zuckerberg, as I mentioned in the video, one of the richest people in the world, created one of the most important communication platforms in the history of man. | |
| No college degree. | |
| Michael Dell, no college degree. | |
| Larry Ellison, no college degree. | |
| Many of the people who've created sort of modernity as we understand it did not have a college degree, and yet it seems condescending to say not everyone's right for a college degree. | |
| Oh, you're so right. | |
| I didn't want to interrupt, but I was cheering you on. | |
| Jeremy Boring gives the latest course at Prager. | |