Politics

Matt Lewis On Obama College “Snobbery”: Universities Could Become “Glorified High Schools”

Republican president candidate Rick Santorum reminded us again Sunday that college isn’t a rite of passage for just anyone and that President Barack Obama is a “snob” for wanting “everybody in America” to experience higher education.

Speaking to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Santorum addressed his Saturday comment about “not all folks [being] gifted in the same way” and explained that it isn’t everyone’s goal to obtain a college degree.

“[T]here are lot of people in this country that have no desire or no aspiration to go to college, because they have a different set of skills and desires and dreams that don’t include college,” Santorum said. “And to sort of lay out there that somehow this should be everybody’s goal, I think, devalues the tremendous work that people who, frankly, don’t go to college and don’t want to go to college because they have a lot of other talents and skills that, frankly, college, you know, four-year colleges may not be able to assist them.”

While New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and a slew of others objected to Santorum’s higher education comments, conservative columnist Matt Lewis defended the presidential candidate’s stance in a Monday column. Lewis interviewed ”Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America” author, Dan Flynn, who said lowering the higher education bar so all would be welcome to partake in it “could drag the school’s down to the lowest common denominator, rather than uplift the dim.”

Lewis, who disliked his own high school years, wrote of a memory with which most of us are familiar: High school teachers having “no control over the classrooms, and thus [spending] much of their time on disciplinary matters — not on education.” Lewis did not encounter this when he entered college, but Flynn said these issues could very well trickle into the higher education environment if everyone were to go to college. Universities would become “glorified high schools,” Flynn said. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to go back to high school.

In an ideal world, everyone who dreams of pursuing higher education would have the resources to go after it and expand their minds in the classroom environment, but not everybody wants the all-American college experience. Some would rather wade the waters of manual labor than take a sedentary desk job, and others may prefer to work at a ski resort to be in touch with the outdoors and help visitors lead more balanced lives. There are plenty of rewarding trades out there that don’t necessitate a college education. “Moby Dick” author Herman Melville put it best when he said, “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” Guess what? That’s very much applicable to today’s world, even though he died more than a hundred years ago.

In case you’d like to hear Santorum make the case for not going to college, here is footage of the speech:

[H/t Washington Post]

TAGS: Barack Obama | rick santorum | Rick Santorum college

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