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Piled Higher and Deeper
My family never had much truck with education.
My father, a successful man, graduated from high school and managed a year of seminary before family circumstances forced him to return home and help in his father’s gas station. Shortly after that, he married the woman who would become my mother eight months and twenty-eight days later. She was an RN from back before college was required for that credential, and she never attended one.
Among their seven children, all unusually bright and articulate, there was exactly one four-year degree, a bachelor’s in accounting awarded to my immediate junior, Stephanie, who is no longer with us. My own formal education ended with high school. My personal commitment to that education really ended after 8th grade: I attended an excellent small Catholic grade school in New York State and a public high school in rural New Mexico that was so mediocre that, years later, the Economist magazine actually mentioned it as an example of a dysfunctional American high school.
I married a woman who returned to college as a non-traditional student and earned a BS in Educational Psychology, which may have been (but probably wasn’t) useful in the homeschooling of our six kids. Among those six children are seven or eight degrees, but they’re unequally distributed: three of them have no degrees at all. There is not a Ph.D. in the bunch.
My father had a low opinion of the value of a Doctorate, an opinion that I, for better or worse and to a lesser degree, share. I’m wary of that anti-academia bias in myself: a lot of very well-educated people are actually pretty smart. I know that. I also know that some of the worst ideas come from some of the most educated people; indeed, some ideas are so preposterously bad that one almost has to have experienced a lot of formal education in order to embrace them. Buckley thought the same way, of course, as evidenced by his famous quip about the faculty of Harvard.
That brings me to the point of this post, which is that the only two US presidents to have received Doctorate degrees happen to be among our very worst.
The first was President Woodrow Wilson, who received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins after doing his undergraduate studies at Princeton. It is to this very educated man and his championing of executive overreach that we owe a debt of gratitude for the modern deep state.
The other is, of course, President Jill Biden, who received her Ed. D. from the University of Delaware, after having received undergraduate instruction there and elsewhere.
Is it any mystery that the Biden administration was an unmitigated disaster of progressive overreach, given that an over-educated school teacher with a Doctorate in something called “educational leadership” effectively sat at the helm?
No. No, it is not.
Published in Politics
Man, that’s just beautiful.
Delectably written, Mr. Racette.
Thank you.
PS: I wholeheartedly second “Arahant”‘s kudos regarding “President Jill”. Zing!
My stepfather had a PhD in Education and taught at NC State. When a friend of mine who was a teacher talked to him about getting his Masters in Education, my stepfather said, “Don’t waste your time.” That pretty much summed it up . . .
Thank you, Hank. This essay is so on the mark.
I have a degree in statistics and one in accounting to which I attribute almost nothing useful in my life beyond maybe being an indicator of resolve or perseverance that might have helped me when I sought new employment in the seventies.
Government funding has even corrupted much of the scientific and technical education that still would yield benefits if done properly.
My family had much truck with education – but only starting with my father. None of his forebears, and none of Mom’s either, nor Mom herself, had anything beyond a high-school diploma. But despite the fierce skepticism of his parents, who’d never known anything beyond a grade-school education, and in Austria-Hungary at that, Dad muscled through college. I proudly have on my walls his 1949 B.M.E. from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, as well as his 1953 LL.B., and – I guarantee you he never let us forget about this one – the 1968 update to his law degree: a gen-yoo-wine J.D.! “Hey, I’m a docktuh!” he’d crow, in his Brooklyn accent. But we loved him so!
If it makes anyone feel better, a week and a half after I defended my dissertation, I was 4000 miles away, buying a bicycle and starting a 1200-mile trip. While I’d been formally studying biochemistry, I’d been informally but just as effectively studying South American languages. That’s how it is with people who love education: they love all education.
All the same, that is a great zinger about President Jill. About me and my family, I did say “education,” not “educational leadership.”
Education is a DIY project and your account shows that in both you and your father.
Aren’t all lawyers also “doctors?” A law degree is Juris Doctor or Doctorate in Law, although I’ve seen it argued that despite its name it’s a glorified master’s degree.
Trump has a BS from Penn and a JD from Ohio. And the JD got his JD from Yale, his BA from THE Ohio State University and his BS from the United States Marine Corps.
Here’s a good comparison of education and experience, credit @douglaspratt:
TRUTH: https://twitter.com/johnhawkinsrwn/status/1883613962950115354
Nobody ever refers to or addresses lawyers as “D/doctor”.
But hey, by all means, let’s stretch the definition beyond its universally accepted usage … norms … and crash right through the usage … guardrails … within which all agree it should be kept, just so that Trump can be plopped into the thread, right?
Good grief.
PS:
Bill Clinton got a JD (Yale), too. So, it bears mentioning, believe it or not, did Joe Biden (Syracuse).
The JD is not a terminal academic credential. As @johnh said about his father, it replaced the Bachelor of laws, or LL.B. I believe in order to teach law, one generally needs a higher degree. Above the JD is a Master of Laws (LL.M.) followed by the Doctor of Juridical Science, abbreviated as S.J.D. or D.J.S., depending whether it’s in Latin of English. The S.J.D. is the legal equivalent of a Ph. D. and what is needed to be a hoity-toity full professor. It is the terminal degree. It is also equivalent to the Legum Doctor* (Doctor of Both Laws) degree (LL.D.) awarded in some other countries.
Personally, I think we should have stuck to the LL.B., LL.M., LL.D. format.
* Or does that mean full of beans?
That bolded bit is sincere: I don’t sneer at people who possess expertise or knowledge, even about subjects that don’t interest me. There are certainly those who have a sincere and deep interest in things that strike me as being almost comically irrelevant, and the world needs — or, at least, is subtly improved by — much of that. I have almost exactly zero interest in Etruscan art, for example, but it seems good that someone, somewhere, does care about it and works hard to understand and preserve it for humanity.
My father’s disdain for the highly educated was, I think, a product of his own peculiarly intense common sense. My father was a wise and practical man who had an unerring knack for spotting foolishness and nonsense and who would have, if not for his wealth of graciousness, bluntly called it out whenever he did.
I remember seeing my dad, back when I was in my late teens, standing by the chain link fence bounding our acre of rural New Mexico property, talking to the new neighbor who had just built a solar-heated home on the acre next door. My dad had been out practicing his chip shot on the side lawn when the elderly fellow, Joe, walked up. Joe was semi-retired from Los Alamos National Laboratories. He had worked with Oppenheimer back in the day; now he did occasional freelance work as a “Consulting Plasma Physicist,” which is actually what was printed on his business card.
That evening my dad expressed a bit of amused exasperation about their conversation. Dad was a pretty good golfer for a guy who worked a lot and helped raise seven kids. He shot in the low 80s, occasionally deep into the 70s. I’ve got his Hole-In-One plaque from the Albuquerque Country Club here on my office bookshelf: “July 23, 1999, Hole #3, 153 Yards, 5-Iron.”
Anyway, Joe, who had never played golf but who did have a Ph.D. in physics, had been giving my dad some helpful golf pointers, telling him how he could improve his swing. My dad’s opinion of the very-educated was shaped by experiences like that.
Perhaps because I don’t golf, I have a pretty high regard for a Ph.D. in physics.
Heh.
On the other hand, often the higher degree will be paid for by the employers, and their regular salary increases after that. They might also be less likely to be laid off even if they have less seniority than others without the advanced degree.
This is the value of the “credential” over “competence demonstrated by performance” in BIG organizational environments like the federal government and near monopoly uncompetitive businesses.
I spent several years working in a research organization populated by Ph. D.s. It didn’t take long to realize that they were smarter than the average bear, but their main failing was that almost none of them realized that the years they spent getting that degree didn’t automatically confer expertise in other areas of study.
I place a high value on a PhD in many fields, while in others the existence of PhD programs just devalues the whole concept. An EdD is a different thing altogether. However, both of them render the holders of those degrees completely unfit for political leadership.
I formed this opinion back in the 80s when Greece had a particularly bad Prime Minister (I think) who had earned a PhD in the United States. Maybe @seawriter remembers something about it.
My husband, a Physicist, says all children are Physicists until their parents ruin them.
Our oldest got a degree in Physics because, having attended multiple university courses to avoid high school classes, he thought it was the only university subject worth studying. After serving as a warrior in the Army, and then becoming a linguist and communications specialist in the Green Berets, he’s now a Navy Aviator. I suspect he’s not done yet.
The kid who got degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Art because he wanted to become a Sculptor in bronze is now…..a Physicist.
The kid with degrees in Japanese, History, International Business and Accounting is a stay-at-home Mum.
The only kid with a PhD is a Plant Pathologist. He just told me he’s working on his first novel.
They all paid their own way with scholarships so at least we didn’t waste our money on all those detours through the Halls of Academe.
Your last sentence.+
As a famous quote has it, attributed erroneously to Einstein: “Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we were taught at school.”
Or maybe mis-paraphrase it to Mark Twain. It could become “If you don’t go to school, you’re uneducated. If you do go to school, you’re mis-educated.”
Graduate education when combined with practical life experience can be immensely valuable. I grew up in a lower-middle class family that always struggled to make ends meet. As a kid I mowed the lawn, fed bottle calves, hoed in the garden and did so many other things that rural life requires.
I had the good fortune to get a double BA from the University of Oklahoma and an AM from Harvard in Russian, East European, and Central Asian studies. And all paid for by the generous taxpayers of Oklahoma and Harvard donors. At Harvard I was surrounded by liberals who had mostly grown up in upper-middle class families and in cities. I had to learn to defend my ideas and my faith in constant debates with a bunch of really smart people who never done manual labor or darkened the door of a church, so they didn’t share my worldview. It made me a stronger conservative and a stronger Christian (and a lot smarter than I had been). I don’t think that was the result that Harvard was hoping for.
There’s a reason that the men and women who won World War II and built the space program that went to the Moon and won the Cold War mostly came from small towns. They were educated in one-room country schools. They had their feet firmly planted in real life and never forgot where they came from. But they also had access to the best ideas in the world.
If you don’t forget who you are, education can be a splendid thing.
So the answer is, we have to put all those people on farms for a few years first, THEN they can go to Harvard.
That was exactly the formula that made America great from 1608 until the end of the 20th century.
It’s not just that they need to do time on farms, but that they need to be part of a family enterprise on a farm. In other words, their parents need to go, too.
I’ve long admired the description of Kermit Roosevelt who plotted the overthrow of Iran’s communist prime minister in the 1950s. Someone said he was the product of a “first class education on a second class mind.”
My impression is that there are probably fewer opportunities for a first class education now a days, but second class minds are plentiful.
Second-class and even third-class minds have always been plentiful.
I want to say that, once one has abandoned common sense, it takes an awful lot of education, whatever the quality, to make a person someone who can contribute usefully to society.
But I can’t. Because I suspect that, once common sense has been abandoned, additional education — even very expensive and elite education — just magnifies the deficit.
I, for one, don’t believe in common sense. If there was such a thing as common sense there would be no need to appeal to it, because it would already be common to us all.