The Egalitarian Nightmare

Few people see cause in attacking equality.

After all, nobody wants to come off as an elitist. Yet, ‘educational equality’ deteriorates infrastructure. The first step on this road to decomposition lies in what I call the Myth of College. As the years tumble forward, Americans are convinced that they all require a college education, and that this education is the cornerstone of genuine success. College is placed high on the psychological pedestal, while skilled labor and vocational positions are seen in the light of a lower caste.

I support college education if a person chooses to become a doctor, lawyer, or academic. Theses professions require further training. However, other jobs, jobs that didn’t in years past, now seem to require a college education, an education that takes the place of practical, in-house training. Subsequently, young people are convinced of the superiority of a college education to both practical work experience as well as positions within a skilled labor workforce.

Getting a job out of high school has never been looked down upon as much as it is today, and an illusory educational elitism has replaced the practical work ethic in the hearts and minds of many of our students.

Is College “Better?”
You might argue that college educations are producing better minds. Yet, the way many professors grade in college, it’s like a No Child Left Behind for adults.

In order to keep up with inflated grades occurring in prestigious schools, the practice spreads to less prestigious institutions. Why? Who wants to be responsible for ruining a student’s opportunity to compete for jobs with others who have inflated grades?

I work one-on-one with undergraduate students who have difficulty forming coherent sentences. That is the real result. These students are being cultivated poorly, and the quality of their education is producing disingenuous results. This doesn’t mean that these students are inferior, just that they are not academics, and that their happiness lies elsewhere. Only, they have been brainwashed to believe that there is only one path to a prestigious end in life: college.

College Debt
In addition to providing both illusory elitism and an ad hoc education to our supposed future leaders, another roadblock exists on the path to real infrastructure: debt.

Almost every graduating student is swamped with student loans that need paid off. Some people say that they have received training to get better jobs to pay these debts off. Let us think back to those positions that didn’t used to require college education and now do.

Many of these are only entry level positions, whose salaries are not comparable to the mountain of debt each student faces. So, these students enter the work force with inflated grades and minds still untrained to perform the task. Needless to say, the bubble eventually bursts, and many people find themselves trapped in jobs they loathe, jobs they do not put their hearts into, jobs whose sole purpose is to ‘pay the bills.’

America has a new graduating class of unhappy, unproductive, undereducated, indentured servants who are neither passionate nor trained enough to provide our country with any type of infrastructure.

Cultivating Personal Pride
The first step toward a viable solution is to show the Myth of College for what it is, a No Child Left Behind for adults with a pile of debt as its only reward. Children need to be taught not to collectively shoot for the same pie in the sky, but to shoot for their own personal pies.

Vocational schools, skilled labor, and small business ownership, must lose their inferior stigmas. These positions are and were the backbone of the American Dream. We all can’t be Rockefellers. Some of us have to be successful on a smaller scale, and there is no shame in that.

There is no greater goal than trying to be the best at what you do no matter what that is. If a person wants to cook hamburgers, they should try to be the best hamburger cook they can be. Why? Personal pride in the work you produce -- the alternative to the Egalitarian Nightmare.

If children were taught this at a young age instead of being cattle-shooted toward almighty college, they might find out sooner rather than later that they had what they were looking for inside of them already. If people work to be the best they can be at what they do, the results of their success will ripple out from their production to rest of America as an unintentional byproduct. Infrastructure will follow, and with colleges more sharply focused on honing the skills of people who require greater education, the quality of our education will rise. Members of the workforce and Academics will be created without one wearing a false mask of shame and the other without a false mask of competency.

This plan does not promote America becoming less educated; it promotes a more honest education for those that require it and a new, more positive mindset as well as a real-world training and experience for those who do not require it.