Dennis Prager Show - Daily Wire CEO, Jeremy Boreing: Why You Don't Need College
Aired: 2020-08-07
Duration: 06:54


=== Liberal Education Factories (02:13) ===

[00:00:00]  Do you know, I am meeting more and more exceptional young people who have not gone to college.
[00:00:07]  Are you experiencing that?
[00:00:09]  I am, absolutely.
[00:00:11]  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.
[00:00:17]  They were learning the sort of essential canon of Western culture.
[00:00:22]  And now that's not the case.
[00:00:23]  A liberal education is anything but liberal.
[00:00:26]  You know, I've come to see college, and I mentioned this in the video, as factories.
[00:00:29]  You know, there's so many of them.
[00:00:31]  They're so well-funded by the government.
[00:00:33]  It's a factory in every town.
[00:00:34]  And like any factory, they exist to create a consistent product.
[00:00:37]  And that, unfortunately, that consistency is worldview.
[00:00:40]  The consistency is the way that they teach people to think or the things that they teach people to think.
[00:00:45]  And as an employer, I know that...
[00:00:47]  I don't want people who all think exactly the same.
[00:00:50]  I don't want people who attack every problem from the exact same vantage.
[00:00:53]  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.
[00:01:00]  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.
[00:01:05]  It's the same when you're building a business.
[00:01:07]  When you first build a business, it's all your ideas.
[00:01:09]  The business is really an extension.
[00:01:11]  But as the company grows, your mind can't contain all of the problems.
[00:01:16]  Your mind can't solve for all of the innovation that needs to take place to make you succeed.
[00:01:22]  And you need people who see the world in a way that you don't see the world.
[00:01:25]  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.
[00:01:34]  Andrew Klavan, our mutual friend, is a great example of this.
[00:01:37]  He says that he went to college.
[00:01:39]  He got his degree.
[00:01:40]  And then he realized he had no education.
[00:01:42]  And so he spent the decade after that educating himself.
[00:01:45]  Well, that's an actual liberal education.
[00:01:46]  He attacked the text to see what the text actually had to teach.
[00:01:51]  Instead of learning about the text through a certain lens from someone else.
[00:01:55]  You know, I just want to tell you what this last comment made me think.

=== Why Learn from Defective People? (02:16) ===

[00:02:02]  There are a handful, like St. John's, I think, has two branches.
[00:02:06]  One in Maryland and one in New Mexico, I believe.
[00:02:10]  They just teach you for four years the great books.
[00:02:14]  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.
[00:02:27]  How could you read?
[00:02:28]  Just forgive me one moment.
[00:02:30]  There was a very important article in the Jewish Journal by Antal Sharansky.
[00:02:37]  The great Soviet dissident who Reagan got out of the Soviet Union.
[00:02:42]  And he's a Jew who moved to Israel and he became a member of the government.
[00:02:48]  He's a very major moral thinker.
[00:02:51]  And he writes about, if we use the standard of were you a good or bad guy, it's all over.
[00:02:59]  And he said, here, as a Jew, I would have to reject.
[00:03:04]  There were so many anti-Semites in history.
[00:03:06]  I'd have to reject most great literature.
[00:03:09]  Shakespeare wrote Shylock about Shylock in Merchant of Venice.
[00:03:14]  Dostoevsky was anti-Semitic.
[00:03:17]  He said, so it's absurd.
[00:03:20]  Because Dostoevsky was anti-Semitic, I have nothing to learn from Brothers Karamazov.
[00:03:24]  Because Shakespeare wrote about Shylock, I have nothing to learn from Othello or Romeo and Juliet.
[00:03:31]  So this guy owned slaves, this guy did this, so it's over.
[00:03:35]  There are no great books.
[00:03:37]  Well, if you can't learn from flawed people, there's no one left to learn from.
[00:03:40]  That's a great, that is a great line.
[00:03:42]  You know, I often think about David being a man after God's own heart.
[00:03:46]  It's actually difficult at first glance to find very much redeeming about him.
[00:03:49]  That's right.
[00:03:50]  At all.
[00:03:50]  Except that he defeated Goliath.
[00:03:53]  Right.
[00:03:54]  That's a good trick.
[00:03:56]  Yeah, that was significant.
[00:03:59]  Jeremy Boring gives the course for PragerU this week about sending kids to college.

=== Why Does Government Fund Colleges? (02:54) ===

[00:04:09]  It's a factory of indoctrination.
[00:04:12]  You mentioned all the money that the government gives colleges.
[00:04:15]  I know this is like an elementary question, but I'm not embarrassed to ask it.
[00:04:21]  Why does the government give colleges so much money?
[00:04:24]  Well, it's in their interest, too.
[00:04:25]  I mean, I don't think the government would do anything that isn't in its interest.
[00:04:29]  Education from the point of view of the government, as you know and talk about often, the government is largely controlled by the left.
[00:04:34]  The permanent government, the elected government might change.
[00:04:37]  You might have a Republican like President Trump come in, but the standing army, the bureaucrats, all lean in one direction.
[00:04:44]  And it's in their interest to raise up a new generation that thinks exactly the way that they think.
[00:04:49]  And what troubles me the most is that the right is so slow to catch on to this.
[00:04:53]  I had the opportunity to have dinner with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and she's a wonderful woman.
[00:04:58]  She spoke very eloquently about the need for charter schools.
[00:05:02]  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.
[00:05:18]  And everyone had the same line about it.
[00:05:19]  It was, you know, not everyone is right for a college education.
[00:05:23]  Some people need to go to trade schools.
[00:05:25]  Some people, the best they could ever do is be a welder.
[00:05:28]  And why should we make them think that they have to go to college and be saddled with all of this debt?
[00:05:32]  We need to teach kids that it's okay to be a car mechanic, that it's okay to take out our...
[00:05:36]  The way I heard it was, with respect to them, I know they're all...
[00:05:39]  Good-hearted people.
[00:05:40]  But all I could hear is, not everyone's as great as I am.
[00:05:43]  Someone needs to take out my trash.
[00:05:45]  Someone needs to help me raise my kids.
[00:05:47]  Someone needs to know how to weld things when I break them.
[00:05:49]  And I raised my hand and said to the secretary, I said, I think that we're actually approaching this question the wrong way.
[00:05:57]  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.
[00:06:06]  But many of the millionaires and billionaires that I know also didn't get a college education.
[00:06:11]  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.
[00:06:22]  Certainly not a college degree.
[00:06:24]  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.
[00:06:31]  No college degree.
[00:06:34]  Michael Dell, no college degree.
[00:06:36]  Larry Ellison, no college degree.
[00:06:37]  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.
[00:06:47]  Oh, you're so right.
[00:06:47]  I didn't want to interrupt, but I was cheering you on.
[00:06:51]  Jeremy Boring gives the latest course at Prager.