Instead they are assigned to read about the detrimental effects of Eurocentric patriarchal imperialism. What they read is true enough, no doubt. But no instructor would dare to assign “The White Man’s Burden,” in which the previously mentioned Rudyard Kipling writes about the detrimental effects of Eurocentric patriarchal imperialism. (Albeit Rudyard was concerned with the detrimental effects on Eurocentric patriarchal imperialists.)
And, come to think of it, I don’t believe any of my children have ever been assigned to read a poem that rhymed. (Although they have seen Hamilton.)
Furthermore . . . as long as I’m fuming let’s not close my chimney flue . . . today’s students know all about climate change but spend too much time indoors staring at screens to know anything about weather.
Thus today’s students are graduating from school too stupid to come in out of the rain. But so did we. So did everyone. That’s the way it’s always been. We don’t get much of our education in school.
This leaves me in charge of the education my kids get outside school . . . I’m lying. My wife is in charge of that. And my kids can be damn thankful for it. But I try to do my little bit.
I give them two rules: mind your own business and keep your hands to yourself. I call these “The Bill and Hillary Clinton Rules.” Mind your own business, Hillary. And, Bill, keep your hands to yourself.
Then I invoke the Fairness Precept. This began with my eldest daughter, a child much given to exclamations of “That’s not fair!” One day, when she was about eight or nine and had worked herself into a huge snit about the unfairness of something or other, I lost my patience and snapped at her.
“Not fair?” I said. “You’re cute. That’s not fair. Your parents are pretty well off. That’s not fair. You were born in America. THAT’S not fair. Honey, you’d better get down on your knees and pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you!”
Finally I teach them about hypocrisy. I teach by example. My mentor on the subject was my old friend (and colleague at the late, lamented Weekly Standard where our conservatism was merely of the half-baked kind rather than being on fire and burning everything to a cinder as is the fashion with conservatism these days) Andy Ferguson.
Andy’s children are older than mine. When his were in junior high and mine were still little, I asked Andy what he was going to say when he was asked—as he inevitably would be—“Dad, did you take drugs?”
Andy, a fellow survivor of the Better Living Through Chemistry era, replied, “I’ll say I never took any drugs, ever.”
“Andy,” I said, “what about that photo of you on the mantle from the 1970s, with your hair down to your butt and a guitar?”
“I’ll say I was playing in a band that performed a folk mass at church.”
“But Andy,” I said, “you’ve published books where you’ve written about being stoned out of your gourd.”
“Reading is part of a good education,” Andy said, “but when it comes to reading there’s one thing you can count on with your kids. They will never read anything written by their fathers.”
Which presumably includes what I’m writing here. Therefore I have told my children that I never took drugs, never had sex until I was married to their mom, and that when I was a kid I made my bed every morning before I left for school.
If the kids believe that, they’ll believe anything. They might even believe in getting a good education.
My Own Lousy Education
And How It May Be of Aid to the Nation
The dictionary definition of education is “The process of training and developing the knowledge, mind, character, etc., especially by formal schooling.” I am unprocessed.
I can’t exactly say I’m not educated. I have a college degree. But it’s in the liberal arts. What knowledge I possess is not trained and developed. Neither is my mind, my character, or—as best I can tell—my etc.
In other words, I don’t know how to do anything. I can’t build a building. I can’t design a rocket. I can’t do math: I can’t do arithmetic beyond the first part of the multiplication tables and I don’t know how much a whole mess of 9’s are. I can’t cure your ills or drill your teeth or represent you in a court of law when you sue me for medical malpractice. I can’t invest or speculate. (That is, I can’t do so successfully.) I can’t turn $1 into $1.01 even with the one-year Treasury rate at 1.54 percent. I can’t fix a flat on your car. (Wait, I can fix it, if you’ll let me roll your car forward a foot or two. Your tire is flat on only one side. I learned that when I took “Physics for Poets.”)
I never studied a subject that has been applicable to my adult life except Abnormal Psych, and let’s not go into details about that.
I was an English major because I was paging through the course catalogue and I saw “English” and I thought, “Hey, I speak that!”
I chose my courses in college according to what time of day the class met, adhering to the rule, “You can’t drink in learning before you drink lunch.”
And I graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. I am ignorant—but I’m good at it.
And that’s the enormous advantage of a liberal arts education. You can’t spend four (or five or six) years of college picking only courses that you can bluff your way through without learning to . . .
It may say “B.A.” on my diploma but what I’ve got a degree in is “B.S.” I can talk the shingles off a barn roof.
Or, as the case actually turned out,
