Obama and student loans -- comment by Victor Davis Hanson

(In pursuit of the youth vote, Obama has proposed that the Federal government completely take over the admittedly corrupt student loan business. In support of that idea, he has complained that he and his wife have only recently been able to pay off their student loans. That the existing corruption is largely the result of government legislation is not being mentioned. See here on that)

OK, already - enough about those loans. I think the Obamas really need to cool it on their personal angst stories about their student loans. Two Harvard Law tuitions are not an entitlement, but a gamble-one of going into short-term debt to have marquee credentials for long-term security.

In their case, their joint professional careers and incomes (apparently nearly a million last year) paid off well and more than justified their savvy undergraduate and professional school Ivy-League gambit.

But consider:

(1) that their Ivy-League student loans are hardly proof of first-hand experience with typical student indebtedness;

(2) that their availability (e.g. why is the public subsidizing Harvard Law School?) should instead be a reason for gratitude to the government for the subsidy rather than anger that it had to be paid back;

(3) that a better source of criticism would be the universities themselves whose tuition rises faster than inflation, and whose billion-plus tax-exempt endowments could subsidize tuition far better, as Congress is now arguing;

(4) that the remedy of eliminating private lenders and creating or expanding another federal agency, is, by liberal universities' own admission, going to raise not cut costs.

There is a familiar theme here unfortunately: the expansion of middle-class entitlements is a birthright that only government can grant; and the experience of relatively affluent Harvard-trained lawyers gives them first-hand empathy with the middle-class ordeal.

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The willingly blind: Letter to the Editor of "The Beacon" from Florida International University faculty member

"The Beacon" is the student newspaper of the Florida International University

It is sad to read the shackled thinking of Matt Luciano, Contributing Writer to The Beacon ("Americans should demand solidarity for Palestine," Jan. 31, 2008). Mr. Luciano unwittingly does a deep disservice to the cause of human rights by linking it to the victimology of Hamas in Gaza, whose demagogues he quotes uncritically and whose terrorism he supports in his article. Mr. Luciano is shackled to uncritical thinking.

The article attacks Israel for its right to defend itself against arbitrary murder. Yes, that is what Mr. Luciano implies when he dismisses "rocket fire" at Israeli towns as if it were harmless firecrackers. Instead, these explosive missiles are fired indiscriminately, with the intent to kill as many civilians as possible and to spread terror. Targets have been schools and shopping centers. In response, the Israelis have pursued individual Hamas officers who instigate the violence as well as defend its borders, and that is the reason the Hamas attacks have been less successful of late.

In addition, the article impugns America for its own network of defense, accusing our government of sending "tax dollars in aid" to our closest ally in the Middle East. That aid is substantially less than the cost we pay just for keeping U.S. soldiers in Germany, in order to defend Europe, or in South Korea to defend its territory, or even just in the tiny Arab kingdom of Kuwait. Further, Mr. Luciano "believes the United States is responsible" for the Palestinian people, but fails to mention the billions we send in aid to them and the twenty-two Arab countries supporting them; in particular, Egypt..

The removal of hatred and threats against Israel is all that's required for peace and territorial compromise-the whole world knows that. Instead of murderous missiles, all the Gazans need to do is something completely nonviolent: to recognize Israel's right to exist in exchange for statehood. This article in The Beacon twists the truth around. The students and faculty of FIU should know that they can find a measure of objective truth in the free press of the only real democracy in the Middle East. Simply read it for yourselves at the Jerusalem Post (www.jpost.com ) or Haaretz (www.haaretz.com ). Mr. Luciano, your education deserves exposure to a democratic objectivity such as Israel's-which does not fail to criticize its own policies-even if you are disposed to accuse the United States for your disaffection.

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Modern-day schools guarantee that there can be no new George Washingtons

By Vin Suprynowicz



George Washington remains the greatest man of our age. But he was no genius. That our children don't really know of Washington's greatness is a devastating indictment of our current schools. As little as a century ago, American children memorized the farewell address, with its stern warning against "entangling" European alliances. Why do you suppose that's now gone? Too many big words?

Washington's officers wanted to march on the capital for their back pay and install him as king. He pulled on his eyeglasses and declined. I have met a few modern politicians who might have had the decency and humility to turn down such a serious offer: George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Mo Udall. But I have trouble visualizing any of them also winning the action at Trenton, let alone Monmouth.

Monmouth receives little attention in the history books, because it was "indecisive." The Brits were withdrawing from Philadelphia to New York. Washington was determined to make his presence felt. But he arrived on the scene to find Gen. Charles Lee -- we will be kind and call the man who requested the honor of command merely incompetent and confused -- withdrawing in disarray. Witnesses report Washington halted the retreat by mere strength of personality but then sat his horse for some seconds, dumbstruck, as his men waited to see what he would do.

This was not some desperate raid, like Trenton. A major battle was in the offing; Washington's troops had just been found running the wrong way; he was suddenly in personal command, and he had not even surveyed the ground. Then, that indomitable spirit took command. As Teddy Roosevelt Jr. was to do when he found himself on the wrong beach in Normandy 166 years later, the general decided to start the battle right where he was.

For no better reason than because no one would dare disappoint Washington himself, an army that had been on the verge of rout lined up as directed, stood their ground, and killed the advancing infantry of the greatest army in the world all day in the hundred-degree heat. When it was finally dark enough, the Brits withdrew -- leaving the much-ridiculed "Yankee Doodles" in possession of the field, and the whole of New Jersey. Washington didn't need any French fleet that day.

Yet to many of his contemporaries, Washington was a mere hick, and not a particularly bright one. John Adams called him "too illiterate, too unlearned, too unread for his station and reputation." Washington's father died when he was 11. His older brother got everything. Determined to make it on his own, George started with nothing. "Washington had no schooling until he was 11, no classroom confinement, no blackboards," notes John Taylor Gatto in the first chapter of "The Underground History of American Education."

"He arrived at school already knowing how to read, write, and calculate about as well as the average college student today. ... Full literacy wasn't unusual in the colonies or early republic; many schools wouldn't admit students who didn't know reading and counting because few schoolmasters were willing to waste time teaching what was so easy to learn. It was deemed a mark of depraved character if literacy hadn't been attained by the matriculating student. Even the many charity schools operated by churches, towns, and philanthropic associations for the poor would have been flabbergasted at the great hue and cry raised today about difficulties teaching literacy. American experience proved the contrary."

Why? Phonics. How did the educrat conspiracy make literacy seem hard, in order to stretch out the schooling process for more than a decade? The "whole word" method. "Killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in this country," said Theodor Geisel -- Dr. Seuss -- in 1981.

There were no "school projects" gluing together pictures clipped out of magazines when Washington was 11. He immediately took up geometry, trigonometry and surveying. Before he turned 18, Washington had been hired as the official surveyor for Culpepper County. "For the next three years, Washington earned the equivalent of about $100,000 a year in today's purchasing power," Mr. Gatto, the former New York state Teacher of the Year, reports.

How much government-run schooling would a youth of today be told he needs before he could contemplate making $100,000 a year as a surveyor -- a job which has not changed except to get substantially easier, what with hand-held computers, GPS scanners and laser range-finders? Sixteen years, at least -- 18, more likely. George Washington attended school for two years.

"We know he was no genius, yet he learned geometry, trigonometry and surveying when he would have been a fifth- or sixth-grader in our era," Gatto reminds us. "In light of the casual judgment of his contemporaries that his intellect was of normal proportions, you might be surprised to hear that by 18 (Washington) had devoured all the writings of Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Daniel Defoe. ... He also read Seneca's Morals, Julius Caesar's Commentaries, and the major writing of other Roman generals like the historian Tacitus. ...

"Years later he became his own architect for the magnificent estate of Mount Vernon. While still in his 20s, he began to experiment with domestic industry where he might avoid the vagaries of international finance in things like cotton or tobacco." Hemp and flax didn't work out. "At the age of thirty-one, he hit on wheat. In seven years he had a little wheat business with his own flour mills and hired agents to market his own brand of flour; a little later he built fishing boats: four years before the Declaration was written he was pulling in 9 million herring a year."

In the meantime, as a sideline, he had marched to war with Braddock at Fort Duquesne, survived a campaign that killed many men of lesser constitutions, and become the best-known soldier on the continent.

Today, in comparison, "No public school in the United States is set up to allow a George Washington to happen," Gatto points out. "Washingtons in the bud stage are screened, browbeaten, or bribed to conform to a narrow outlook on social truth" -- basically, locked away in sterile isolation for 12 years.

"Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of 13 would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.

"Anyone who reads can compare what the American present does in isolating children from their natural sources of education, modeling them on a niggardly last, to what the American past proved about human capabilities. The effect of the forced schooling institution's strange accomplishment has been monumental. No wonder history has been outlawed."

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