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Aug. 7, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
06:54
Daily Wire CEO, Jeremy Boreing: Why You Don't Need College
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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.
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.
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.
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