Copyright © 2011 by P. A. Ritzer

15 November 2011

Instead of the government-student-loan approach to college financing, I propose the Knute Rockne approach, dramatized in the 1940 film Knute Rockne: All American, in which, fittingly, Ronald Reagan became the Gipper.

Rockne wanted to study at the University of Notre Dame. So, in order to do so, he worked four years at the Chicago Post Office and saved his money. And he continued working. Besides climbing up from a scrub to captain of the football team, he graduated magna cum laude and was offered a job at Notre Dame as a graduate assistant in chemistry. He accepted, as long as he could also help coach the football team. From 1918, when he took over as head coach, he compiled a record of 105 wins, 12 losses, 5 ties, 6 national championships, an .881 winning percentage, highest ever in college or professional football, before he died in an airplane crash at the age of 43. He once said: “The best thing I ever learned in life was that things have to be worked for” (www.knuterockne.com).

On the other hand, today we hear of “jobs Americans won’t do.” What! Jobs Americans won’t do! Since when? Since they could rack up tens to hundreds of thousand of dollars in government-backed or -provided student loans while immersed in youthful ignorance that does not appreciate the trap it sets until they are caught in it, or liberal arrogance that does not care who picks up the tab for their indulgence. And since, in 2009, President Obama and the Democrats engineered a federal take-over of the student-loan business, the president now claims the right to slash the amounts students will have to pay back to the taxpayers. Here’s one more tool liberals can use to turn Americans into effete, dependent, disgruntled, thoughtless voting machines ever ready to pull the lever for the liberals who will do their best to keep them that way.

I think of some of the jobs I had from the age of ten or so that helped pay my way through college and keep the student-loan monster from growing out of control: pulling weeds, delivering papers and collecting payment, mowing lawns, sweeping floors, cleaning bathrooms, installing drain tile, flipping burgers, painting, hanging sheetrock, laying concrete block, striking joints between bricks, and just plain hauling by hand: brick, mortar, block, sheetrock, shingles, plywood, beds, windows, you name it. And most of my friends and family worked similar kinds of jobs.

And from that background I look with disgust upon the display of covetous malcontents–the Occupy Here, There, and Everywhere set–squatting on Wall Street and other public and private properties across the nation. And here is where the sluggish old gray matter churns up a solution. I will run the risk of assuming that these Occupy folks are Americans. And I can think of nothing that would better cure their ills than work.

Sooooo–I know you’re way ahead of me here–take away the student loans, (and dismantle other liberal devices, like the minimum wage, designed to protect a self-serving elite and limit the number of people who can find work) and suddenly we would have a vast number of people who would have an incentive to do the jobs Americans hitherto would not do! Think of the advantages. Instead of the spoiled Occupiers content to wallow in the filth and stench of their own sloth and discontent, we could have industrious citizens energized to wash off the dirt and smell earned from a day of honest hard work. Most would strive for something better and leave the entry-level work for the young workers who would follow in their footsteps. And their hard work at entry-level jobs would give more of a value to the reasonably priced education no longer artificially inflated by government student loans.

And having worked for their money, these young people would likely take a more mature and responsible approach to how much they would be willing to spend on their education and what they would expect to receive for their expenditures. Consequently, they would in all likelihood be less willing to spend what they had earned on much of the nonsense now taught at institutions of higher learning, and for that matter, would be more likely to identify the nonsense for what it is. This would help bring down college costs even more. And with a mature, responsible student population better able to identify and less likely to abide nonsense, liberalism and its attendant political correctness would naturally waste and slink away, and institutions of higher learning could once again freely and honestly search for and explore knowledge and truth as in days gone by.

But what if some natural genius of humble means cannot earn enough to attend Ivy League U? Well, he could apply his genius to studies at Local U and perhaps help raise the standing of that institution–rather than sacrifice himself to the liberal god of the status quo–and leave Local U a better place for those who would follow in his path.

Where does illegal immigration fit in? Bear with me.

(to be continued in Part Three)