Hello, Lately I read a lot about the US, and I am getting a bit puzzled by seeing it hasn´t got a Universal Healthcare system, that students have to borrow a great deal of money to study, that US overthrew a lot of Dictators and put others more "suitable" , that there is so much inequality (which leads according to several researches to drug abuse, imprisonment, and so on and on), in short: It seems to me that it is the end of the so-called "American dream" and I would say it is now "The Nordic dream" . I look astonished on how many shootings there are in schools , I look astonished how a bunch of guys have so much money, whereas the other 95%...in short, pure or almost pure capitalism. The great thing about the Nordic countries and others like Holland, Germany, and so forth is that capitalism is mixed with socialism (meaning there is a wide safety net for the poor). WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA? , Has it worked , the "American Dream"? .
I'm 51. When I was a child the American dream was to achieve a lifestyle more comfortable than your parents or grandparents and live long enough to see your children get richer than you and your grandchildren prepared to overtake their parents. For me the task was almost too easy. My grandfather decided early not to follow the family career path as a commercial fisherman. That was bad timing for such a decision. Commercial fishermen kept their jobs during the depression. He was usually unemployed and raised his 7 children in roach-infested apartments before buying a house at age 54 (when I was one.) the seven children all dropped out of school. The oldest got his GED in the military and graduated from college in his mid-40s so he could get promoted to manager at his job of 17 years. I got through college with the help of financial aid and easy loans at low interest. My first full-time job paid $260 per week and seemed good enough. When that didn't work a lazy year earned me $9000 but was still enough to pay my bills and enjoy leisure time. At 29 I earned my age and bought a house with my mother (she having lied about high school to get a comfortable government job.) At 39 I finally married (with a lower income than 10 years earlier) and bought a bigger house with my wife. Then everything fell apart and now we're penniless in an apartment my grandparents would have shunned. We don't qualify for the safety net. My stepdaughter lost her job last year and can't find anything worthy of her credentials. Poor people can still dream upward and probably get there, but the middle class gets poorer and their future prospects weaker every year. The only way up is a golden ticket: pro sports, recording contracts, reality shows or lottery winnings.
That's your problem right there. No wonder you're confused when you ignore an obvious defect just because the self-appointed authorities on reform never point it out. Even if college students had free tuition, they would have to live in miserable poverty that causes permanent psychological damage to their personalities. Even more important than the damage done to these class-climbers, because whoever lets himself get bullied like that deserves no respect or sympathy, is the inevitable result that such slavery excludes the best people, those with pride. The fact that the students who put up with this have no pride proves that they have nothing to be proud of. College is work without pay; no other description of it is relevant. It is nothing but an insult to intelligence and shows the arrogance of the inferior rich parasites who demand it. College puts inferior people in superior positions, and these people, who run things, are responsible for all the other problems that you and others could name, not the disempowered public. For America to survive, the obsolete university must be replaced with highly paid professional training, which the spoiled but not special children of the rich have always received in the form of allowances.
College is funny isn't it? a surgeon can recite the biography of Charlemagne to you after he removes your gall bladder. An architect can name all the muscles on a frog while he advises you on what type of brick to use for your foundation. An accountant can quote Shakespeare as he reads your w2s and that makes us a better country. meanwhile a person with a master's degree in education can't win the limit on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?
You're referring to another part of the humiliation regime. Force students to take unnecessary courses in order to make it even harder to earn a living while going to school. I wonder why Diploma Dumboes continue to ignore the fact that all a college degree means is that the graduate lived like a little boy until he was 22 because he was afraid to grow up. Are they preparing us to be boytoys?
College was curious for me because I learned so little new material in classes like English literature or history. The words in the textbooks weren't even harder to read. There were new subjects like philosophy and geology, but nothing I couldn't have understood a few years earlier. I just got my master's degree in education and while it was tough the readings weren't much harder, just more boring. Apparently if I proceed to a PhD all I'll learn there is what I come across doing a huge research project. A college curriculum is largely pointless beyond your specialty unless it represents new learning from high school.
I feel like we've sort of shot ourselves in the foot with the pro-freedom/anti-socialism attitude (I'm using 'pro-freedom' kind of ironically here, since I think we have a confused definition of it in the US). A lot of our policies are based on the idea that we should be free to choose how to spend our own money (ie. on consumables instead of on healthcare or education for people we don't know), but it means giving up what I would consider greater freedoms like not having to worry about how you'll pay for it if someone in your family gets sick, or entering the workforce without tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. Honestly, I'd rather have a healthy, educated populace than an iPhone, so no, I don't think the American system is working.
Germany? You mean the country that is going to be second most responsible for letting the world's banking system take us into WWIII, second to the US of course? I love arrogant Europeans who think that what is occuring in the US isn't a global phenomena, with global consequences! Currency wars!! The path to WWIII.
