Use anti-discrimination law to remove the college degree requirement for jobs. Start with government jobs. Governments notoriously “over-qualify” jobs. Other than the pure professions, there are very few entry or technical level government jobs that can’t be performed effectively with a HS diploma or GED. Come to think of it, attack the HS diploma requirment as well; let the GED suffice. Some of the best entry level employees I ever had didn’t have diplomas but rather GEDs. They were bored with HS, disgusted by the indoctrination and “self-esteem” pander, so they dropped out, got a GED and went to work.

To the main point, unless an employer can demonstrate a legitimate business utility in a degree requirement, such a requirement acts as an artificial barrier that discriminates against the poor, minorities, and women. It’s easy to demonstrate. So, lets sue them. Private employers are harder than governments, and also less sensitive to the pressure of a discrimination suit, but the principal is the same.

In the same vein, steer your kids into the trades. A good plumber or electrician is going to make more than MOST lawyers. The Tradesman will never make as much as the superstar lawyer unless he forms his own company, but the average tradesman will make more than the average lawyer or accountant these days. There’s a lawyer or accountant on every street corner. Tried to get anything fixed lately?

Or, encourage your kids to enter the military – unless BHO abolishes it. I have two stepsons, 26 and 22. The 26 yr. old has a degree and even though we helped him, so much debt that he can barely live, even with a decent job. (He’s learning the hard way that when you’re a college student, you should live like one rather than continue to borrow money so you can live in the manner you prefer.) The 22 yr. old was on a sleighride to Hell when we snatched his life away from him and put him in the State’s Military Academy. He got his HS diploma there and went on into the Army as an infantryman. He’s completed his active duty contract and is enrolled in the University next semester. He has significant savings, a nice car, nice clothes, and between his savings and his GI bill benefits will be able to have a degree with no debt.

And finally, we do usually control about half the states. In the states we control, we really do need to pay some attention to who we appoint to Boards of Regents and who our Regents allow to become university Chancellors and Presidents. If we control the government, we control this sort of thing, but most Republicans don’t pay any attention to this stuff and just take the recommendation of “the university community.” In the states we control, we should pay at least as much attention to who the Regents, Chancellors, and Presidents are as we typically pay to who the football coach is.

As with all things educational, you need to start with the texts whether you encourage your children to be tradespeople or academics, They need a solid grounding in the history of ideas and in world history, philosophy and political economy, and economics.

Every parent who wants to raise a literate child (and it helps to be literate regardless of which career you choose) should compile a list of books (and not necessarily the latest ones from the Conseravative Book Club) to purchase for themselves and their children. They should keep them prominently on the bookshelf at home and encourage their children to read them with the entire family.

I think we need to resuscitate the Redstate Recommended Book List, it’s been a while since we talked about it.

so much so we have sacrificed out of our one income (she stays home as a traditional house wife or as the left would say ‘she doesn’t work’, BAH!) to send both or our children to Christian schools. We’re by no means rich, we’ve just made a decision to sacrifice out of our personal pleasures now so our children will have a shot at actually being able to think when they get to college instead of repeating things without understanding them.

Oh, I already have hardback copies of the declaration of Independence and the Constitution sitting next to Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative waiting for them.

I attended first grade at Franklin School in Union Township, New Jersey in 1976, when the public school system in Union was still excellent and the primary concern of the teachers was educating children rather than indoctrinating them.

It’s well known in primary education that the girls are generally more adept at reading skills, particulary at the beginning, and usually a little earlier than the boys. So my first grade teacher, Mrs. Page, used to hold classroom reading drills that are almost unimaginable today:

She’d divide the class according to gender and make the sexes compete at reading aloud and then describe what they had just read, in their own words. We’d line up on opposite sides of the classroom with our readers and go down the line, reading excerpts from the books, and then she would rate us individually and as a team, and the strongest members on each side would help the slower ones.

At the beginning of the year, the girls were way ahead. The boys were awkward readers, a little inarticulate, they had trouble with the phonics, they had trouble expressing themselves when asked to give a good explanation for what they’d just read. For the first couple of months we all kind of dreaded this biweekly ritual. But I will never forget the day that the boys in the class pulled even with the girls and after having been trounced for about two months straight, we finished the line and Mrs. Page announced,

“I’m sorry girls, but this time the boys were better readers.”

Priceless.

That colleges really “convert” anybody, if only because as a college student I have a lot of trouble imagining any of my fellow students listening to anything that their professors tell them anyway. Granted, as a mathematics student I’m not as exposed to political speeches from my professors, but I’ve sat through discussions in freshman politics class some years back, and pretty much all of them are liberals anyway. I think we might put too much stock in what comes out of universities, and not enough into looking at what goes into them.

Let’s face it, anybody with a passion for “gender studies” is probably a liberal. Chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and others who study “applied” sciences are more likely to be not very religious, if only because in their daily life, they are instructed constantly to never believe anything without empirical evidence. Psychologists, sociologists, social workers? They want to “help” people. Is it any surprise that they think the government should be involved in the helping?

In short, I don’t think the problem is that universities take our moderate, conservative, and apathetic young people and turn them into liberals, I think it’s that most of the people who go to college are liberals in the first place. Throughout the ages, “liberal” has been pretty much the default political position for those just coming of age. I’ve found that the “real world” often conservatizes them.

So why a higher instance of liberalness among college students? Well, they don’t go straight into the workforce. They don’t pay as many taxes (at my school, you don’t pay sales tax, and any paycheck you get from the school isn’t subject to income tax). Their encounter with the “real world” is delayed. But give them time, the real world has a nasty way of creeping up on you when you least expect it. Who knows, maybe 75% of my generation will grow up to be flaming liberals who will take over the country. But frankly, I don’t think it’s all that likely.

“We put conservatism back in the law. Let’s put it back in our schools.”

The continued prosperity of our constitutional republic requires both.

However, we really have neither.

It’s true that we’ve recently experienced some notable gains in the federal judiciary, but the “balance” of the courts, especially the district courts, significantly favors the left.

And it gets worse.

The Democrats, by design, successfully blocked most of President Bush’s judicial appointments which created critical shortages in many of the circuit courts.

President Obama will not have that problem, nor will his judicial nominees suffer the same ill-fate, because the Republicans who “sit” on the Senate Judiciary Committee have no spine.

Holder’s nomination as Attorney General will be indicative regarding the severity of the setback to the federal judiciary.

Education: Home school or private school, unless you have the political capital to eliminate the Department of Education. There’s no longer any hope for our government schools. Only 29% of eighth-graders nationwide perform at grade level. You could mitigate the damage somewhat by getting elected to your local school board, but you’d still be on board a sinking ship.

George W Bush won the presidency by a hair. I believe politics like the economy works in cycles. The last 28 years favored conservatism (republicanism). The previous cycle favored activism (democrats). This cycle may require a different political and economic approach to governing if republicans are to win again. I’m not sure if the universities are becoming laboratories for liberal ideology or thinking. There are a lot of people hurting financially right now and are looking beyond the free market system or ideology for answers. I also think that the country has become a lot more permissive as it relates to lifestyles and culture. I am not saying this is a good thing. But unfortunately is is happening.